


How To Make a Singular Noun Possessive

by Liketheriver



Series: How to... Series [3]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Angst with a Happy Ending, Case Fic, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Related, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 12:08:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 51,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15994907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liketheriver/pseuds/Liketheriver
Summary: When Steve is shot and kidnapped, it's up to Danny and the rest of the team to find him before it's too late.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, River, what did you do during the hiatus? Oh, you know, just wrote a follow up fic that was even longer than the original. This fic is set about six months after they establish their relationship in How to Conjugate a Relationship. It isn't absolutely necessary to have read that fic first, but some things will make more sense if you do. Also, this fic is flashback central...I think there are even flashbacks within flashbacks. These relate to missing scenes from canon as well as my previous fics.
> 
> This fic is complete. It is broken into chapters for ease of reading since it is so long.

It was a depressing commentary on Danny Williams’ life that he could tell he was in a hospital even before he opened his eyes.

He cracked one eye to test the light level, see if it caused a splitting headache, because hospitals usually meant head injury.  Unless it meant gunshot wound, or exposure to chemical or biologic agents, but he really wasn’t feeling any pain or trouble breathing, so he was going to go with the optimism Steve liked so much and rule out any of those increasingly common occurrence.

The fluorescent lighting didn’t cause any shooting agony through his skull, so he opened his eyes a little wider.  However, seeing Lou’s face instead of the one he was expecting had him frowning and pushing himself up to look around the room.

“Take it easy, Danny, don’t rush it,” Lou cautioned. “I’m going to call a nurse.”

Danny ignored the warning and the information about medical staff.  “Where’s Steve?”

The depressing truth was, if he was in the hospital, for whatever reason, Steve would have been at the scene of the injury, either to give aid or need it himself, because he was probably the unintentional cause of it in the first place.

“Steve?” Lou asked in confusion and obvious worry.

“Yes, Steve,” Danny insisted, his own anxiety growing.  “You know, way too tall and way too little self-preservation instincts to take care of himself.  Where is he?”

Lou’s eyebrows closed rank on his otherwise smooth forehead.  “I’m going to skip the nurse and go straight for the doctor.”

Danny suddenly felt a knot form in his stomach.  “Lou, where the hell is Steve?”

“Hey, look who’s finally awake!” a familiar voice exclaimed from the door. 

It wasn’t Steve’s, but hearing it momentarily overrode any thought of the other man.  “Matty?” Danny exclaimed in shock to see his brother…his dead brother…standing in the doorway and not, you know, dead in a fucking drum in a Colombian drug lord’s cellar.

“How you feeling, bro?  You sure gave me and Gracie a scare.”

“Matt, how…?”  Danny rubbed at his forehead.  “What is going on here?”

“Matt and Grace found you unconscious on the floor of your kitchen this morning,” Lou provided.   “Do you remember what happened?”

“ _They_ found me?” Danny demanded, still reeling from the fact that his goddamn _dead brother_ was standing beside his hospital bed.  “Why didn’t Steve find me?”

Matty looked over to Lou in uncertainty, and Lou just gave a shrug that said he had no idea what Danny was talking about either.

“Danny,” Matt started slowly, “do you remember what happened in Colombia about four years ago?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do remember what happened; every fucking detail is seared into my brain.  Steve and I went to pay your ransom to Reyes, only he had stuffed your body into a drum, and then he threatened Grace, so I killed him.”

Matt and Lou exchanged another look before Matty sat down on the edge of Danny’s bed and rested a sympathetic hand on Danny’s leg.

“You and Steve, you paid the ransom.  Reyes didn’t kill me. You two saved my life.”  Matt paused, watched as Danny tried to process the information.  “But there was a gun fight on the way out, and Steve…Steve didn’t make it.”

“What?” Danny’s brain couldn’t seem to comprehend the words his brother was saying.

“Steve stayed back,” Lou added.  “Gave you two the cover you needed to get away.”

“That’s…that’s not what happened,” Danny insisted.  “There was a drum.  Matt, you were in the drum.”

“A week after you and Matt got back to the States, there was a drum delivered to the Palace.”  Lou took a breath, obviously trying to bring his own emotions under control. “Your brother wasn’t in the drum, Danny; Steve was.”

Danny followed Lou’s gaze as it moved to where a 55-gallon drum, rusted and dented, sat in the corner of the room.

With his heart racing in all out panic, Danny pushed himself further up in the bed, trying his best to back away from the barrel and what, _who_ was in it.

“Danny?” a groggy voice called.

A hand landed on Danny’s chest, and Danny jerked awake to find himself in Steve’s bed, Steve’s room, Steve’s house, and thank Christ, _Steve_ next to him in bed.

“Whoa.”  Steve’s voice was instantly alert at the feel of Danny’s heart pounding wildly beneath his fingers.

Even in the dim moonlight coming through the window, Danny could see the worry in Steve’s eyes, like he was trying to decide if he should call an ambulance because Danny was in cardiac arrest, or just throw him in the Camaro, turn on the sirens, and make a run for the hospital himself.

Deciding he didn’t feel like dying in a fiery crash tonight with a frantic Steve behind the wheel, Danny rolled over and pressed his face into Steve’s chest, breathed deeply of the familiar scent of the man who was here and alive and not in a fucking drum.  “It’s not…I’m… you were….” Jesus, he wasn’t making any sense, but Steve was here, in bed the way he was every night, and that made all the sense in the world.  He wrapped his arms in a death grip around the other man, wishing he could climb under that inked skin and take up permanent residence there.  “Dream,” Danny exhaled against the broad chest.  “Just a stupid, fucking dream.”

He felt Steve relax at the confession, felt warm hands rub along his back when Danny shuddered.  “Easy, Danno, easy.”

Those were almost the exact words Steve had used in that cellar in Colombia, after Danny had put a bullet in Reyes’ brain, staggered back two steps, and felt his knees wobble as the floor threatened to fall away beneath his feet.  Danny didn’t even see the blood, didn’t see the derma matter on the wall behind, didn’t see Steve step up behind him.  All he could see, even when he closed his eyes, was the drum with his baby brother in it. But he felt the way his heart raced, felt the world tip drunkenly, and felt Steve’s strong arms around his chest.

“Whoa, easy, Danny.” Steve’s voice had been muffled by the sound of blood pounding in Danny’s ears that were still ringing from the gunshot, but the words were strong and steady, just like his best friend.

Christ, he’d just killed a man, executed him.  Sure, Reyes had killed Matty, killed hundreds in the past, and would have no doubt killed that many more and then some if Danny hadn’t shot him; but Danny was a cop, he was supposed to uphold the law, and now he’d done _this_.

How would he ever be able to look Steve in the eyes again, much less Grace? “I… Jesus, Steve, I …”

Steve apparently heard the apology in Danny’s voice.  “It’s okay,” Steve assured at Danny’s ear, “You’re going to be okay. I’ll make sure of it.”

“But, I…” Danny started again lamely.

Leaning his head against Danny’s temple, Steve asked, “You trust me?”  When Danny nodded wordlessly, because what could he even say to that question?  Of course, he trusted Steve; it’s why the man was there in that fucking basement with him in the first place. “Then it’s all good.  _We’re_ good, Danno.  I swear to God, we’re good.”

Danny, out of a warped sense of desperation and need, had believed him.

Almost four years later to the day, lying wrapped in Steve’s arms, Danny still believed him.  “We’re good,” Danny mumbled against bare skin he knew so, so well.

“No, Danno, we’re better than good,” Steve assured with a kiss to the top of Danny’s head.  “We’re so far beyond good its crazy.”

Danny wanted to cry at the declaration, or fuck Steve into the mattress until the image of the drum from his dream was lost in the sound of Steve calling his name in all out bliss.  When he got right down to it, however, he knew neither was a good idea. The former would only serve to worry Steve more than he already was, and the latter just seemed like it was even more desperate and needy than the crying …or believing Steve in Colombia when he convinced Danny he’d ever be good again after executing a man.

“Don’t you even think of blaming your mental issues on our relationship, McGarrett.” Danny managed to keep him voice from cracking, but it was a near thing.  As it was, it went a little hoarse on Steve’s name.  “You were crazy long before we ever met.”

“And yet here you are in bed with me,” Steve pointed out, rubbing Danny’s back once again.  “Not to mention, totally nude.”

“Apparently insanity is contagious, sexual transmitted, no less,” Danny justified with a press of lips against Steve’s skin before turning to rest his cheek against the same spot to feel Steve’s heart beating reassuringly.  He closed his eyes, soaked it in, and tried his best not to think about imaginary drums filled with Steve’s body parts.  He couldn’t keep his brain from settling on the real one with Matty’s instead. 

With another shudder, Danny sat up and scrubbed at his face, as if that could chase away the memory.  It didn’t, but at least it helped to hold the threatening tears at bay.

Steve didn’t stop him from pulling away, although he kept one hand on Danny’s arm as he propped himself on the other elbow.  “Danny?”

“Uhm, water,” Danny lied, knew Steve would see right through it, but hoped like hell he’d just let it go.  “I could use some water.  You want some?”  He was already throwing the covers back to climb out of bed.

“I’m good.”  Steve’s brow furrowed in worry. 

Danny watched the conflicting desire to keep a hold on Danny so he could make it all better and the understanding that Danny needed a few minutes alone battle briefly across Steve’s face.  Jesus, he loved the hell out of this doofus.

Leaning in, Danny murmured, “No, babe, you’re so far better than good it’s crazy.”  He pressed a quick kiss to Steve’s lips and promised, “Be right back.”

Once downstairs, Danny drank a glass of water, not that he really wanted one, but that was why he’d said he’d come down here.  Glancing at the clock on the microwave, he saw it wasn’t even three a.m.   Having no desire to lay awake in bed for another three hours waiting for the sun to rise, he snagged a pair of sweats off the top of the dryer.  Not realizing they were Steve’s until he pulled them all the way up to his waist only to find he still had about half a mile of pant leg trailing past his feet, he tugged the extra fabric up to bunch around his ankles, then headed out past the lanai and onto the small beach.  He wiggled his bare toes in the damp sand, breathed in salty, humid air, and simply stood in the welcome darkness that melded sea with sky in the distance.  Even in October, it was still in the 70s at night, something Jersey wouldn’t see for at least another six to eight months.

It had barely climbed into the 50s the day of Matty’s funeral four years before.  It was raining buckets the day Danny flew home.  It rained so hard the streets in his parents neighborhood flooded so that his sister’s couldn’t make it over that night.  Hell, they barely made it to the funeral home the next day.  It seemed the more it rained, the harder Ma cried, and the more she cried, the quieter his dad got, so that Danny thought he might lose his goddamn mind in the sound of sobbing that filled the otherwise aching silence of the house.   It broke his heart to see his parents like that, almost more than losing Matty had.   Danny couldn’t stop thinking that if he’d found the money sooner, looked for Matt harder after his brother had gone on the run, hell, pulled the trigger and stopped him from getting on that fucking plane in the first  place, all of this could have been avoided.  Matthew may have been in prison, but he would have been alive, and Danny never would have had to hear his mom crying like her heart had been ripped from her chest.

The sun finally came out the day of the graveside service, although the ground was so muddy one of Bridgette’s shoes came off in the muck as they made their way back to the cars.  His mom had laughed at that.  It was weak and filled with sniffles, but it was a laugh that had Danny and his sisters looking at each other in surprise.

Ma had shrugged and blew her nose.  “What?  It’s funny.  Matthew would have thought it was hilarious.  Knowing him, he probably plotted it from up in heaven.”

She was right; it’s exactly what his piece of shit brother would have done, which was why Danny and his sisters burst out laughing, too.  So loud that the priest gave them a disapproving frown, which just made them laugh louder.  His mom was back to crying that evening, but those few minutes gave Danny hope that his family would eventually bounce back from the tragedy of losing Matt.  He just wasn’t sure if he’d ever bounce back from what he’d seen, or what he’d done as a result.

That guilt, of failing his brother, of failing his family, of failing to uphold the standards Danny believed a cop should uphold, went a long way in explaining why he didn’t fight the extradition back to Colombia.  A part of him had given up on himself.  Steve, however, never did.  Never would.  And that went a long way in explaining why Danny thought he might actually go more than a little nuts if he ever lost Steve.  Six months into this thing they had going, and Danny knew he’d never get out of it alive or sane.  There were times like tonight where he honestly didn’t give a damn about either just as long as Steve was in it with him every step of the way.

As if on cue, the man on his mind stepped up behind Danny. 

“When you said you needed water, I didn’t realize you meant the ocean.”  Steve stayed back a few feet, giving Danny space if he still needed it, although it was obvious he was fighting every instinct in his body telling him to move closer.

Danny decided to put him out of his misery.  He reached back to snag a corner of the blanket Steve had draped around himself to pull him closer.  Steve immediately opened his arms to wrap them and the blanket around Danny from behind, and exhaled in relief against Danny’s temple, like he was the one grateful to have Danny in his arms again and not the other way around.

Leaning back, Danny asked, “Are you still nude under this blanket?”

“Someone stole my sweats,” Steve justified, as if they were the only stitch of clothing he owned.

“So that gives you permission to skulk around in the night like some totally naked animal?”

 “As opposed to a fully clothed animal?” Steve snorted then nuzzled behind Danny’s ear.  “Besides, I was kind of hoping you might eventually want to come back to bed and do some things that wouldn’t require any clothes.”

“I know,” Danny admitted, feeling more than a little embarrassed.  “I just…Ma’s going to call a day from now, and she will have already been to the cemetery and…sorry, you’re right, let’s go back to bed.”

Steve, however, didn’t move, held Danny firmly in place.  “Hey, I get it, anniversaries of these sorts of things… trust me, I get it.” 

If anyone would get it, it would be Steve.

“The dream, it was about your brother, wasn’t it?” When Danny nodded reluctantly, Steve kissed his jaw.  “You want to tell me about it?”

Steve knew a thing or two about bad dreams.  Danny had been there on more than one occasion when Steve had clawed his way back from the ghostly remnants of some mission gone wrong, some mission that marked one of those many anniversaries Steve had cataloged in his brain.  As much as Danny knew Steve hated to talk about them when the dreams came, he always did.  Danny supposed he should return the favor.

“Matt was alive,” Danny confessed quietly with an uneasy shift of his shoulders.  “We had paid the ransom in time, and he didn’t die.”

“Those are rough,” Steve told him.  “When I was a kid, I used to dream my mom was alive, and it would be great as long as the dream lasted.  But then when I’d wake up, and she wasn’t there… it was rough.”

“Matt was alive, but you weren’t,” Danny continued, concentrated on keeping his voice level as he ripped off the emotional Band-Aid to get it all out.   “You, in typical Lt. Commander McMoron fashion, had stayed behind so we could get out.  So all and all, the dream wasn’t so great, either.”  Danny stared out at the black water, grey waves breaking in the distance.  “I got my brother out of the drum, but you ended up in it.  Apparently, even my subconscious will only let me have one or the other, but not both.”

Steve stiffened but didn’t let go.  “That’s a tough choice.”

“You,” Danny told him confidently as he turned to wrap his arms around Steve’s waist.   “Without a doubt, without hesitation, I’d choose you every time.  It would break my Ma’s heart all over again, my dad’s, my sisters’, and I guess that makes me a god-awful son, but I don’t care.  If I ever had to make that choice, I’d always choose you over everyone else.”

Steve’s arms tightened around Danny.  “You know I’d do the same with you, right?   Well, I mean, after Grace and Charlie.  They’re always top of the list.”

Danny snorted against Steve’s shoulder.  “Just when I think I can’t love you anymore than I do, you go and prove me wrong.” 

Steve had demonstrated his commitment to Danny’s kids time and time again.  Danny still remembered the hostage crisis at Grace’s school dance, and Steve busting into the room and immediately calling for Grace.  Not Danny, Grace.   He’d been joking about picking a base when Steve asked about a hug, but honestly, Danny would have dropped to his knees and given it the old Seaton Hall best if Steve had asked him to, and it was all because of how much Steve loved his kids. 

“Obviously, Gracie and Charlie come first,” Danny assured him, “That goes without saying.  But, babe, you are only a short step behind.”

“Just one more reason you guys should move in here,” Steve told him, his fingers running soothingly along the nape of Danny’s neck.

Danny sighed.  Steve had been on him for the past several weeks to not renew his lease when it was up next month and instead move in here. It had started as soon as he got back from his annual two weeks reserve training.   Danny wasn’t sure exactly what happened during that time, but Steve hadn’t let up on him since he got home.  “Are you trying to take advantage of me in an emotionally vulnerable state?”

Steve’s arms tightened around Danny as he shrugged.  “Depends.  Is it working?”

“Steve, we’ve been over this…”

Steve cut him off.  “I know you’ve got the kids settled at your place, but we can settle them again here.  There’s plenty of room, they love the beach and the yard, and we can set up their rooms exactly the same way they are at your place.  You can’t tell me the extra money won’t come in handy when Grace goes to college in a couple of years.  Besides, it’s not like we don’t sleep together every night as it is—“

“That’s not entirely true.  You have your monthly weekend warrior duty for the Reserves, not to mention when you run off to places like Nairobi—“

“Nigeria,” Steve corrected.

Danny was just trying to throw Steve off his argument game.  He knew exactly where Steve had been when he’d gone off on a rescue mission to find Joe.  Not just the country, but exactly where in Nigeria they would be.  He’d made damn sure of that by showing up at Steve’s and immediately pulling the massive world atlas he’d seen on the bookshelf there that had to be almost as old as Steve and weighed as much as Charlie, and sat it on the kitchen table.

“Show me,” Danny had ordered as Steve came down the stairs with his bag slung over his shoulder, and shit, he was really going to go.  He was going to go out in the jungle or desert or to some third-world, overpopulated city on a death wish mission and maybe never come back.  Not that Danny had doubted it for a second when Steve called to tell him in vague terms what he planned to do, but Danny had hoped he’d never have to face this day as more than just Steve’s best bud.  It shouldn’t make a difference that they’d been sleeping together for about a month at the time, but it did.  It sure the fuck did make a huge difference.

Steve had learned his lesson years before that he didn’t run off overseas without speaking to Danny _in person_ about his plans.  Danny had also learned his lesson that Steve would do anything for Joe White.  Hell, Danny owed Joe almost as much as Steve did, for the exact same reasons of bringing Steve home from some foreign hellhole as many times as he had, often at Danny’s request.

“And don’t pull any of that ‘it’s classified’ bullshit either,” Danny warned.  “You’re not supposed to know anymore about it than I do.”

Steve sighed.  “Danny, I don’t even know where we’re going other than Nigeria.”

Danny was already flipping through the atlas to find the correct page.  “You’ve run missions there before, right?” When Steve finally nodded his head, Danny tapped at the map.  “Then you have a pretty good idea where these sorts of people tend to hang out.  So show me.”    Steve hesitated, and Danny shifted, trying to keep his worry-induced anger in check.  God, he’d never wanted to punch Steve in the face so badly while also wanting to hold the idiot close and confess his undying love for the man.

“I’m not trying to keep you from going.”  Although, if he thought it had half a chance of working, he’d latch onto Steve’s leg like a human home-arrest anklet.  “I just…I need _something_ , Steve, or I’m going to go out of my fucking mind.”

Steve had caved, showed him the regions he thought they might be in, then checked his watch.  “Damn, I need to go.”  He leaned in, kissed Danny hard.  “You’re not going to hear from me for several days.  I’ll do my best to call or get word to you as soon as I can, but with multiple transports, sketchy communications lines, don’t be surprised if it’s over a week before I do.”  At Danny’s nod, Steve cautioned, “You’ll be down two of us at Five-0, so take extra care of each other.  Okay?”

“You and Junior do the same,” Danny told him.

“Tell Grace and Charlie...” Steve floundered then. Danny wasn’t sure if it was because he was afraid he was crossing a line even thinking about saying something to Danny’s kids, or if he genuinely didn’t know what to say to children when you might not be coming back.

“Don’t worry about them,” Danny assured.  “I’ll take care of it.”

“I love you guys.” Steve patted at Danny’s chest, his expression holding the same intensity it held when he was briefing the team before a raid.  “I love _you_.”

Stuffing his hands deep in his pockets to keep from grabbing Steve and never letting go, Danny gave him a genuine, if weak, smile.  “Love you, too.  Talk to you soon.”

Soon ended up being five days later, at a quarter past midnight, on a shit connection, that lasted less than a minute.  It was enough to let Danny know Steve, Junior, and Joe all made it out alive.  Steve was smart enough to keep the nearly being blown to bits by friendly fire to himself until he got home.  Junior hadn’t been so bright when he’d talked to Tani the next day, and Danny was ready to rip Steve a new one as soon as he made it back to the islands three days later.

Danny had opened the front door to Steve’s house as soon as Eddie perked up when the headlights from Steve’s truck had tracked across the living room.

Eddie had run out to meet him, and Danny could hear Steve greeting the dog in the dark before he moved into the porch light.  All the anger had bled away from Danny at the site of him.   Jesus, he shouldn’t feel this relieved to see him in person.

Steve had given Danny an exhausted smile as he climbed the steps up to the stoop, his bag slung over his right shoulder, his vest in his left hand. “Hey, you’re here.  I wish you’d let me know.”

Danny shrugged self-consciously, afraid, maybe, he’d overstepped some unknown boundary with Steve and his first few days back from a mission. “I just wanted to, you know, make sure you were really okay.”

Steve spread his arms when he reached the top of the steps, as if showing he was uninjured. “Well, I wouldn’t have wasted time swinging by your place if I’d know you were here.”

Danny exhaled in relief that he hadn’t screwed up.  “I figured you’d want to be at home when you got back.”

“Why do you think I went looking for you?” Steve asked in what appeared to be genuine confusion.

Danny couldn’t help the smile that spread on his face as he leaned casually against the doorjamb.  “Gotta say, babe, you look beat.”

“Yeah? Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Steve challenged with raised eyebrows.  “I’ve been in an active combat zone.  What’s your excuse?”

“You’ve been in an active combat zone,” Danny told him honestly, the smile slipping before he recovered with a smartass, “Guess there aren’t a lot of decent beds to be found in situations like that.”

“Last decent bed I slept in, you were in it. You’re kind of a prerequisite for a decent bed these days.”  Steve stepped in close, so close Danny could feel the heat of him, close enough to lean down and kiss Danny.  He didn’t.  “So, Danny, you want to move your ass so I can get in the house and drop my shit?  I’ve been waiting nine days to get my hands on you, and that’s kind of hard to do when they’re full of gear.”

Danny grinned wider and stepped aside.  “Didn’t stop you from saying hello to Eddie.”

The gear landed unceremoniously just inside the door, and Steve snagged Danny shirtfront to pull him in closer. “I don’t plan to have an obscene amount of sex with Eddie.”

“I’m sure the ASPCA will be as relieved as Eddie and I are to hear that.”  Danny rested a hand on Steve’s hip, rubbing his thumb along the spot just above, and watched Steve’s eyes go slightly out of focus.  “What about Junior?”

“I don’t plan to have sex with him either.”   When Danny rolled his eyes, Steve grinned.  “He went for beers with the other guys in the unit.  Told me at least three times he wouldn’t be home for several hours.”

Whether he was staying away out of consideration for Danny and Steve’s reunion or avoidance of it for his own sanity, Danny wasn’t going to question Junior’s gift.  “Do I owe him malasadas?”

“For letting us have the house free to make some x-rated noises? Sure.”

That wasn’t what Danny meant, but he let it go, just grateful to have Steve back no matter who was responsible.  Now that he had him, Danny wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. His brain seemed to be shorting out as soon as it bumped up against the thought of, ‘thank Christ he’s home.’  

Steve seemed to be having the same problem, although he was studying Danny with Tactical Calculations Face, seemingly running through a dozen preplanned scenarios trying to decide which to field first.

Danny decided to nudge him on, tugging on the hip he was gripping to pull Steve in tight against him.  “So, sex, huh?”

“An obscene amount,” Steve promised again before deploying his first strategic assault.

Ends up Steve’s plans included a hell of a lot of sloppy, open-mouth kissing, and both of them getting off with a hand down each other’s pants before they even made it all the way up the stairs.  Then again, maybe that fell under the old adage that no plan survives first contact with the enemy… or your partner’s dick… whichever the case may be.

Steve was smiling like a total goof when Danny straightened enough to look him in the eyes again.  “So, I take it you’re glad I’m home.”

“So, I take it _you’re_ glad to _be_ home,” Danny countered.

“What clued you in?” Steve asked.  If possible, his smile grew as he followed Danny’s gaze down to the sticky mess between them.  “I’m going to hit the showers.”

“I might join you,” Danny offered.

“No ‘might’ about it.”  Steve emphasized his statement with a deep kiss, with lots of tongue and want and promise of so much more than a quick hand job on the stairs.

Danny, honest to God, felt light headed afterwards.  He dropped his head to rest against Steve shoulder, basking in the reality that Steve was here.  Here and alive and uninjured and Danny could finally confess, “God, you have no idea how much I missed you.  Missed you and worried and imagined shit…”

“I may have some idea,” Steve told him, nuzzling at Danny’s temple.  “After the past year we’ve had, do you think it was easy to go off and leave you unsupervised?”   Steve cupped the back of Danny’s head.   “Listen to me; we’re spending the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours together, as long as the criminal element on this island will let us.  Just you and me.  You got it?”

It wasn’t the criminals that eventually called them back to work, unless you counted Kamekona and his suitcases stuffed to overflowing with small, unmarked bills, it was a Russian submarine.  That didn’t take away from the two days they spent in bed together that were some of the best of Danny’s life; still, the nine days Steve had been gone had been some of the worst.  Danny had at least spent them at his place, not surrounded by everything that defined three generations of McGarrett men and their dedication to the United States Navy at Steve’s house.  The house Steve was insistent Danny make his own.

“Where you go doesn’t matter,” Danny tried to explain as they stood on the beach of that same house.  “What matters is that I’d be here in your house thinking about you because there’s nothing else to think about here.”

“See, that’s just it, Danny.  I don’t think of this as _my_ house; it’s my dad’s house.  It’s always been my dad’s house ever since I thought my mom died, and he sent Mary and me back to the mainland.  But when you’re here, and the kids, then it starts to feel like _our_ house, and I love that feeling.  Man, you have no idea how much I would love for you to think of this place as ours, too.”

Danny almost gave in…almost…but there were other things, things he really didn’t want to talk or even think about tonight, which had him hesitating.   Instead, Danny tilted his head up and kissed Steve warm and slow.  Steve, for his part, cupped Danny’s jaw with one hand and kissed him back.

“You make a very compelling argument,” Danny confessed against Steve’s lips.

Steve was running his thumb along Danny’s jaw.  “Is that a yes?”

“It’s an, ‘I swear I’ll seriously consider it’,” Danny promised.  “I’m sorry, babe, that’s the best I can do tonight.  Especially tonight.”

“Yeah, okay,” Steve relented, but Danny didn’t miss the disappointment in his voice.

“You want I should blow you in the beach chair?” Danny offered with a waggle of his eyebrows to try to make it up to him.  “In one of _our_ beach chairs?”  Regardless of whether he lived here or not, after all the time they’d spend sitting in the chairs drinking beer and watching the sunset, after the vision Danny had of them sitting in the chairs as old men, Danny already thought of those chairs in the possessive.

Despite the fact that Danny could feel Steve growing hard at the prospect, Steve put up at least a modicum of a protest.  “You do realize all the beaches in Hawai’i are public beaches.”

“Says the man who came onto this public beach wearing only a blanket,” Danny pointed out, already pulling Steve toward one of the chairs.

“Someone could come along at any minute.”  Steve was wearing a grin as he dropped into one of the chairs, placing his arms along the armrests so that the blanket spread open and exposed every glorious inch of him.

Danny eased to his knees in the damp sand, running his hands along the muscles of Steve’s thighs before pushing them apart and moving a hand in to cup and fondle Steve’s balls.  “Then they’re going to enjoy the hell out of the show.”

Steve slid down a little further in the chair so he could rest his head against the seatback, closed his eyes, and exhaled Danny’s name.  Yeah, he was just getting started, but Danny was already enjoying the hell out of this show himself.

~H50~H50~H50~H50~H50~

Every time Steve thought he was getting the hang of this parenting thing, something like this would happen.  This particular something was the unnerving feeling of being watched as he slept, only to open his eyes to see a six-year-old standing and staring at him from a few feet away. It was like waking up to find himself in the middle of one of those horror movies with creepy kids.

Even as Steve flinched back from the unexpected sight, his hand instinctively reached for a weapon that wasn’t there.  Danny was already murmuring desperately at his ear, “Charlie, it’s Charlie.”  Steve felt the hand Danny had resting warmly under Steve’s t-shirt as he slept press almost painfully against his bruised abs to hold him firmly in place.

Steve didn’t blame Danny one bit, was thankful actually, considering what had happened the first time Charlie had shown up silently lurking in their bedroom as if he could will them to wake up by staring silently at their sleeping forms.  That time, Steve had reached his gun that usually rested on the nightstand by his bed, only to find himself pointing it at Danny.  Somehow, Danny had managed to launch himself over Steve and out of bed with almost inhuman speed and agility to place himself protectively between Steve and his son.

Danny had done his best to form a human shield to block any shot Steve might have gotten off, as well as Charlie’s view of the weapon.  “Hey, _Charlie_.  _Charlie_ , what’s wrong?”  Danny had asked, stressing the child’s name so Steve would know who it was.

Steve had blinked in confusion when Danny glanced back over his shoulder, realized what he was doing, then immediately slid the gun under his pillow and out of sight. 

Danny visibly relaxed when the gun disappeared, then he quickly ushered Charlie out of the room to get the requested glass of water and put him back to bed, leaving Steve alone to run through a dozen different what-if scenarios, all of which made Steve feel like he wanted to scream. 

When Danny came back to the bedroom, Steve was already dressed and tying his shoes.  “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I think, maybe I should leave, go back to my place.” Steve hadn’t looked up from his task at hand.  His heart was racing; terrified that Danny would not only agree with him, he’d say Steve shouldn’t spend the night when the kids were here.

“Steve…”

“I’m so fucking sorry, Danny.” Steve braced his forearms on his knees and hung his head.  “Christ, I would never point a gun at Charlie.  You know that, right?  Did it scare him?  Of course, it scared him. It scared the shit out of me. How could it not scare him?”  The more he rambled, the more panicked Steve became that he’d fucked up, seriously fucked up, like ruined things with Danny forever fucked up.  Because Danny could tolerate a lot of Steve’s crazy, but when it came to his kids, Danny didn’t fuck around.

Danny had squatted in front of Steve, placed his hands on Steve’s knees and ordered, “Steven, look at me.  You aren’t going anywhere; you aren’t running away from this.  You screwed up big time, my friend, but Charlie’s fine.  They’re more resilient than you think they would be at this age.  If anything, he’s more confused than scared, and you can talk to him in the morning.  Until then, you aren’t going anywhere.”

“I pulled a gun on the two of you, Danny,” Steve repeated, as if Danny hadn’t seen the whole damn thing.

“Yes, you did.  You did point your gun at us.  Did you fire it?  No, you did not.  As soon as you woke up enough to see it was us, you put it away.  I know you, you idiot, you would never hurt anyone in this house, just the opposite.  And believe me, it freaks me the hell out, too, when I wake up and see my kid standing and staring at me while I sleep.  I should have warned you that they do that sometimes.  I’m just used to it, and eventually you’ll get used to it, and adjust your highly redacted, SEAL-honed instincts to recognize Charlie’s breathing pattern in the dark.  Although, maybe, from now on, the sidearms stay on my side of the bed.”

Steve had immediately handed over the weapon, which Danny placed in the drawer of the nightstand with his own.  At Danny’s coaxing, Steve took off his shoes, climbed back in bed, and spent most of the rest of the night staring at the ceiling with Danny’s fingers linked with his and resting on his chest. 

At the first hint of sunrise, Danny had cracked an eye and demanded, “What the ever living fuck, McGarrett? Have you been awake all this time?  Go to sleep.” 

He did, sleeping harder than he thought he would, because when he woke, Danny wasn’t in bed anymore, and Steve could smell bacon and coffee.  Charlie had greeted him happily when Steve walked into the kitchen, showing Steve how he could flip a pancake under Danny’s watchful eye.  Danny was right; Charlie was more resilient than Steve had thought, more resilient than Steve. Then again, maybe he had a shorter attention span than Steve, although Danny would argue that was an impossible feat.  It didn’t stop Steve from spending the next two weeks apologizing to Charlie with daily trips to the shave ice stand, and to Danny with cocoa puffs and some downright smutty sexual acts that neither of them had tried before.

Steve’s instincts still couldn’t recognize Charlie while asleep, but with Danny’s help, they were getting better.  Enough so that he was the one this time who asked in a sleep-scratchy voice, “Hey, buddy, what’s up?  Need a drink of water?”

“I don’t feel good,” Charlie informed them, proving his claim by promptly throwing up on the floor.

Steve couldn’t help but recoil in disgust. They’d somehow gone from _Village of the Damned_ to _The Exorcist_ in thirty seconds flat.

“Great,” Danny said over Steve’s shoulder, his own face screwed up at the sight of the spaghetti they’d had for dinner now forming a puddle at Charlie’s feet, “this day just keeps getting better and better.”

Yeah, this really was the cherry on top of a crapfest of a day.  It had started off in pretty spectacular fashion with Steve in a beach chair, and his dick in Danny’s mouth, which Steve had learned was good for a hell of a lot more than bitching about living in a tropical paradise.  Steve had a smile on his face the entire time he made coffee that morning, even when Danny staggered into the kitchen and called him brain damaged for being so happy so early in the morning.

Steve had trapped him against the refrigerator, the carton of milk for his coffee still in Danny’s hand.  “You have only yourself to blame, Detective Williams.”  After the kiss Steve planted on his lips, Danny couldn’t help but smile the rest of the morning, too.

Then Kai had been waiting in Steve’s office with a folder of photos.

“My sister works as the housekeeping manager at the Wave Rider Hotel,” the officer had told them as he handed over the folder.  “One of the maids found these in a room she was cleaning.  They must have slid down behind the desk.   It’s standard practice for the maids to turn in any items that are left behind when someone checks out.”

Steve had opened the folder and his good mood vanished.  There was a photo of Steve and Danny climbing out of the Camaro at a crime scene at the docks earlier in the week. Steve had a sudden, sickening flashback to a similar photo of Danny with ‘he deserved to die‘ handwritten across it.

“She recognized you two and called me,” Kai continued. “I brought them over as soon as I saw them.”

Steve barely heard him.  As disturbing as the first photo had been, it was nothing compared to the second.  It was Steve, his left arm draped around Grace’s shoulder, Charlie’s hand held in his right, all three of them smiling as they walked from the soccer field to the parking lot.  It had been taken the last Saturday Danny had the kids. Usually, when Charlie had soccer practice, Danny would stay with him at the field while Grace and Steve went for a run in the park. That week, Danny had to help the D.A.’s office walk through some evidence for an arraignment the following Monday, so Steve had volunteered to take the kids on his own. He’d let Grace drive from Danny’s house to get some more time behind the wheel before her upcoming driver’s test.  After soccer practice, they’d swung by, picked up Danny, and ate lunch at the shrimp truck.  It had been a great day, and apparently, someone had been spying on them the whole time.

Danny snatched the photo out of Steve’s hand as he demanded, “The person who had the room, you have a name, an address, credit card information?”

Kai pulled out his notepad.  “The name on the registration was Gloria Garcia from Miami, Florida.  She paid cash, no credit card on file.  She stayed two nights.”

“These photos were taken more than two days ago,” Steve noted.   “Maybe someone else took them for her, and she was just picking them up?”

“Or she’s moving around,” Danny added, his fingers beckoning to Steve.  “Keys.  I need the keys.”

Steve knew exactly what Danny had in mind, to bring in Grace and Charlie.  “I’m going with you.”  They were supposed to pick them up after school for the weekend as it was, it was just happening a few hours early now.

Danny nodded once before directing, “Pua, pull all the video from the hotel, and have anyone who can identify her go through them.” 

“I’ll oversee the video review myself,” Kai promised earnestly.

Danny was already heading out the door.  “Jerry, I need you to run a name.”

Steve was hot on Danny’s heels as he told the HPD officer, “Call your sister.  Tell her not to rent that room or let anyone else enter.  We’re sending over a team to process it.”

The name was a dead end.  Jerry called while Danny was checking Charlie out of school.  There were over a hundred Gloria Garcia’s in Miami, if that was even her real name.  Jerry was still cross-referencing the name against flights to the island, but since they had no idea when she had arrived, it was going to take some time.

By the time they returned to the Palace with the kids, Tani was calling from the hotel room.  “We haven’t isolated any clear images of our suspect in the video so far, but Eric’s found something.”

Danny’s nephew’s voice came on the line.  “The room had been cleaned by housekeeping, but I was able to find traces of silver in the bathroom drain.”

“Silver is used in photo processing,” Jerry noted.

“Ding, ding, ding,” Eric said through the phone.  “Give that man a prize.  Silver halides to be exact. The paper the photos were printed on was pretty generic, didn’t look like what you’d see with commercial processing, no business logos or stamps, so I played a hunch. Whoever had this room was the one who processed the photos, and she was doing it old school, with film, not digital.”

“Have you guys found anything else in the room?” Danny asked hopefully.  “Any prints?  Anything else she may have left behind?”

“Sorry, Uncle D, we’re still looking, but so far no prints.  I did pull a hair from the shower drain.  I’ll run DNA on that, but that can take a day for results, even with a rush.”

“Do what you can, Eric,” Steve told him, keeping an eye on Danny who had walked to the far side of the room with his hands formed into fists.  “And good work on catching the silver halides.”

When he disconnected with Tani and Eric, Steve walked up behind his partner.  “Hey, how’re you holding up?”

“There’s someone taking photos of my children, how do you think I’m holding up.”

“I know,” Steve tried to sooth, although he wasn’t in much better shape.  “I was there when they were being taken and I didn’t notice anything.”

Danny blinked.  “You were there, in both photos.  This could have nothing to do with Grace and Charlie and be all about you.”

That thought had already occurred to Steve, and it really didn’t change matters.  “Danny, they can use them against me the same way they can use them against you.”

“I know, babe.”  Danny scrubbed his face.  “I can’t shake the feeling they’re missing something at the hotel, but I don’t dare leave the kids here and go check it out.”

“Lou and Junior are here,” Steve pointed out.  “If we can’t leave them with a former SWAT captain and a former Navy SEAL, who can we leave them with?”

Danny didn’t get a chance to answer before the building alarms started blaring, signaling a security beach. “What the hell?”  Danny asked as he moved to look out the window.

“Something must be going on in the lobby,” Lou noted as the alarms abruptly ended.

“False alarm, guys.” Jerry put away his phone. “Apparently, someone had a gun in their bag. Forgot they had it in there. Security is questioning him now, but it seems to be a legitimate mistake“

Steve, already on edge about the photos, wasn’t going to take any chances. “I’m going down to check it out.”

Danny didn’t seem to be listening to what either Jerry or Steve was saying.  Instead, he was intently watching someone out the window.

“Danny,” Steve tried to get his partners attention.

 Danny beckoned him closer. “Come here, look at this.  The woman out by the statue with the camera, watch her.”

“Danny, we can’t arrest every woman with a camera—“

“There!” Danny pointed.  “She did it again. She cocked the little doohickey on top of the camera.  You only have to do that to advance film!  You don’t have to do that with a digital camera.”

“Son of bitch,” Steve mumbled as he watched her aim the camera toward the building, not the statue, and advance the goddamn film.  “Junior!”

Danny was already waving Steve toward the gun locker where they stored their tactical gear.  “Go, go.  You two bring her in.  I’ll stay here with the kids; keep an eye on her as long as I can.”

“Sir?” Junior asked as Steve pushed a vest into his hands.

“Suit up,” Steve ordered, slipping his earpiece into place.  “She’s outside taking photos of us right now.”

“Are you shitting me?” Lou exclaimed when he heard what Steve had just said, already pulling a vest of his own from the locker.

“Steve, she’s moving,” Danny warned, never taking his eyes from the window.

“On it,” Steve promised.  “Jerry, call down and put the building in lock down then suit up yourself.  Maybe have a little dress up playtime with Grace and Charlie.” 

Jerry nodded his understanding that Steve wanted the kids in vests in case things went south in the building, but to try not to scare Charlie unless it was absolutely necessary. 

“Danny, head’s up.”   Steve tossed Danny a vest of his own. 

“I’m going to the roof so I can keep her in sight. See if she has anyone else with her.” Danny told him, clipping a radio to his belt and taking pair of binoculars in the hand that wasn’t carrying his vest, then breaking into a jog.

“Lou?”  Steve asked, knowing the older man would understand.

Lou was already loading his shotgun.  “No one’s getting past me to those children, Steve.”

With a quick nod, Steve finished securing his own vest in place even as he headed out the door with Junior at his side.  He filled Junior in on the description of the woman… khaki shorts, white shirt, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, grey backpack…about as generic as they came.

They made their way through the lobby, the guards already conducting full bag searches of anyone already inside before the lockdown occurred.

Reaching the locked doors, Steve gave a sharp whistle to the guards. The one who was dealing with the guy with the gun looked up from the notes he was taking about the handgun on the desk to see Steve motion to the door. “Open up.”

The guard pushed the button to override the locks, and then they were outside and into the blazing sunlight. Steve cursed even the short delay as he scanned the area for the woman. There were several tourists taking photos of the Kamehmeha statue, all of them backing away to see two men in tactical gear approaching them, but their suspect wasn’t one of them.

“Danny, talk to me,” Steve ordered tensely.

“Hold on…got her.  She’s on King’s Street, heading toward Richards.  Shit, she just hailed a cab.  Move.  You need to move.”

Steve and Junior broke into a run even as the conversation continued in their earpieces.

“Which taxi company?” Jerry asked.

“Manale,” Danny supplied.  “Steve, they’re on Richards.”

As much of a pain in the ass the one-way streets were on the commute in this part of town, Steve at least knew they could only be traveling in one direction.  He also knew the traffic was a bitch this time of morning, which could only act in their favor.  Steve signaled for Junior to cross over to the other side of the street so they could flank the car.

“I have eyes on three cabs,” Junior reported.

“It’s the middle one, far right lane, turn lane,” Danny told them.  “Steve, if they turn on Queen’s Street I’m going to lose them behind the buildings.”

“Can you see a plate or cab number?” Jerry asked

“Partial plate…last four digits 6842,” Danny said quickly before adding frantically, “They’re turning!  Nononono…Fuck, I lost them!”

Steve could see Junior already making the turn at the same corner the cab had, and Steve pushed for a little more speed, darting through traffic to a barrage of honks and squealing tires as cars hit their brakes to avoid him.  At least most of them did.  One unfortunate driver didn’t see him in time, and Steve managed to roll up onto the hood to avoid the car slamming him into the pavement.

“Jesus, Steve!” Danny’s worried voice rang in his ear.

“I’m good,” Steve grunted as he slid off the hood and took off once again, this time at a staggering run.  

The traffic on Queen’s opened up, and after another two blocks, the cab was long gone from Steve’s sight.  Junior was a couple blocks further down the street thanks to Steve’s run in with the car, so Steve called, “Junior, anything?”

“No joy, sir,” he told him in obvious disappointment.  “The traffic is just moving too fast.”

Steve paced a small circle in his own frustration and took a deep breath, feeling the familiar twinge of bruised ribs.  He’d obviously hit that car harder than he thought.  “Not your fault, Junes.  Let’s head back.  Danny, anything?”

“Nothing.”  Danny’s voice was full of his own irritation that they’d lost her.  “At least it doesn’t look like she had anyone else with her.  It’s all quiet here.”

Steve cursed silently at the delay in getting out of the building, at being so close then losing her like this. The alarms were probably what spooked her in the first place.

“Commander,” Jerry cut into his thoughts, “what’s your 20?”

“Queen’s near Fort,” Steve told him as he bent and sucked in air.

“Standby for delivery of suspect in about two minutes,” Jerry notified them.

“What?” Steve asked in confusion.

“I contacted the cab company, and they rerouted the driver,” Jerry informed him.  “He’s heading your way now.  Unless you’d rather I had him drop her somewhere else.”

“No,” Steve said, still a little dazed at what Jerry was telling him, “here’s good.”  Steve was seriously going to give that man a raise.

Junior was back and was already taking up a position on the opposite corner, and within a few minutes, they had Gloria Garcia in custody.

Danny joined him in the interrogations room about the time Steve finished handcuffing her to the chair. Danny held a folder in his hands that he opened, pulled out a stack of I.D.s they’d recovered from her backpack, and started scrolling through them.

“Gloria Garcia, or should I say, Gabriella Ramirez, or is it Inez Marcos?  Sometimes, I guess it’s just hard to settle on a name.”

The woman remained silent, glaring at them defiantly.

Danny bobbled his head at the attitude.  “Okay, no big deal, maybe we’ll find your real I.D. when we search your hotel room with the key you had on you.” 

Lou and Tani were already there with the crime scene investigators.

He slipped the I.D.s in his shirt pocket, and reopened the folder of photos as if to show them to Steve for the first time.  Danny grimaced as he pulled out the photo of the two of them.  “Gotta say, she didn’t exactly get your best side in this one.”  He turned it around to flash the photo at the woman so she knew what they were looking at.

“Bad angle,” Steve supplied, playing along with their standard interrogation banter.  “Must be tough to get a clean shot when you’re not allowed past a police line.”

“Now this one,” Danny said, his voice full of mock admiration as he pulled out the photo of Steve and the kids, “this one is a beauty.  No pesky perimeter set up to block your view.  This is the kind of photo I’d frame and put on my office desk.”

Steve paused, considering what Danny just said.  “Wait.  You’d put a photo of me and the kids on your office desk?”

Danny frowned.  “Of course I would. That’s what people do; they put photos of their family and their loved ones on their desks.”

“Yeah, but I’m literally right across the hall from you.  We see each other all the time.”

Danny was looking at him with that expression that said, ‘you’re an idiot’.  “You’re an idiot.  You don’t put photos on your desk to remind you what people look like.  You do it because it makes you happy to see them being happy when you look at it.”

“Huh,” Steve considered as he studied the photo.  He didn’t have any pictures of Danny or Grace and Charlie in his office. He didn’t have much of anything in his office that wasn’t related to naval memorabilia.  Taking the photo from Danny, he showed it to the photographer.  “Did you happen to get any good shots of him with the kids?”

Danny snatched the photo back.   “No one is putting photos taken by a stalker psychopath on anyone’s desk.”

“I’m not a stalker,” the woman finally said, with a faint Latina accent and roll of her eyes.

“Oh, really?” Danny’s free hand made an all-encompassing motion over the photo he held.  “Photos of my children taken without anyone’s knowledge or consent would suggest otherwise.”

“I’m a freelance photographer,” she told them.

Danny’s eyebrows rose.  “Lot of need for aliases in that profession?”

She shrugged.  “I sell to the highest bidder or on commission for certain magazines that will pay for quality photos of persons of high public interest.  People learn my name, and it makes my job more difficult.”

“What? Like celebrity photos for tabloids?” Steve scoffed. 

To be honest, the woman could have been the subject of those same types of photos… dark eyes that smoldered even without much makeup, full lips, and a body made up of the perfect combination of firm muscle and soft curves. Even her long hair she wore pulled back looked like it would fall seductively around her shoulder when she let it down. Not that he was interested in that sort of thing anymore, not since he had Danny, but just because he’d fallen in love didn’t mean he’d lost his eyesight.

“You’re paparazzi?” Danny snorted.   “Because I can tell you right now, there isn’t a lot of interest in a couple of cops from Hawai’i.”

“A couple of cops who were behind an international incident with the Russian consulate and a submarine off the coast of Hawai’i,” she countered.

“That happened months ago,” Steve reminded her.  “No one even cares about that anymore.” 

The woman raised an eyebrow.  “The same couple of cops who also happen to be secret lovers?”

“It’s not a secret,” Steve said, and yeah, that sounded pretty lame even to his ears.

“The Miami Mirror is planning an expose on the two of you.”

“The Miami Mirror?  Never heard of it,” Steve told her honestly.

“You will if the story gets picked up by one of the larger outlets.”  The woman shrugged.  “Call them, they’ll confirm my story.  I was sent here to get the photos.”  She grinned knowingly.  “Like the ones I took last night at your house…on the beach.”

Steve couldn’t keep his eyes from widening at the news as a litany of ‘shit shit shit shit’ ran through his head. 

Danny, to his credit, kept his face neutral.  “And what name do we use for the verification?”

“Elena Alejandro.”

With that bit of information, Danny turned on his heels and walked out the door.  Elena, if that was even really her name, gave Steve a smug leer before he followed Danny out into the hall.

As soon as the door closed to the interrogation room, Danny whacked Steve hard with the folder. “I told you not to get on that stupid submarine.”

Steve glared at Danny as he rubbed at his shoulder.  “And I told you that was a public beach.”

“Yes, yes you did say that.”  Danny agreed as he leaned in closer.  “You know what else you said last night?  ‘Oh, God, Danny.  Holy fucking God, don’t stop’.”

“Oh, God,” Steve pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes at the thought of that amazing memory being spread across the cover of a bunch of tabloid magazines.

“Pretty much just like that,” Danny pointed out.

Steve hadn’t lied; their relationship wasn’t a secret. That didn’t mean they were all over each other and handsy in public. Sure, they might share a kiss hanging out with the rest of the team after work, but it didn’t go further than that. Now everyone would see a hell of a lot more than some light petting.

 _Everyone_.

“I never thought I’d say this, but for the first time in my life I’m glad my dad isn’t alive to see this.”

Danny skipped the folder and punched him in the same shoulder this time.  “But mine is!  Not to mention both our mothers and our sisters!”

Steve’s anxiety just grew at that thought.  “Mary.  Fuck, Mary.  Can you imagine what she’ll do if she sees that?”

“Send us another Happy Pride card like she did when you told her we were dating?  Or another Wham album for you to listen to way more than any sane human being should?”  Danny threw his arms wide.  “You’ll forgive me if I’m a little more worried about what my ex-wife is going to do when _my children_ see it.”

Steve put his hands on his waist and took a deep breath.  He’d survived terrorists, and warlords, and BUD/S…and fuck me, Joe was going to see those photos, too…no, no, focus, _focus_ …. he’d dealt with all of those, he could figure out a way to handle this, too.

“Then we get the photos,” Steve told him in dawning realization. “She just took them last night.  Chances are she hasn’t even had time to print them.  They may still be at the hotel.”

“The hotel being searched by Tani, Lou, and Eric?”

Yeah, not the best people to find them.   Those three were going to give them hell about this for the rest of their lives.  Still…

“Better they see them than our moms,” Steve pointed out.

“Yeah, okay,” Danny relented.  “You have Jerry check her story, I’ll call Eric.”

The story panned out. Eric found the negatives and turned them over with only a few smart-ass comments drowned out by uncontrollable snickering.  Lou kept saying he needed to bleach his brain, and Tani…Tani asked Danny for pointers.

Danny, for his part, had glared at Steve.  “By the way, you aren’t putting these on your desk, either.”

So, yeah, Charlie throwing up his dinner on Danny’s bedroom floor really wasn’t all that surprising considering how the rest of the day had gone.

Danny patted Steve’s arm where they lay in bed.  “Divide and conquer?  You take the puke, I’ll take the puker?”

At the time, Steve kind of felt as if he was stuck with the short end of the stick. Then, after Danny had changed clothes twice due to Charlie missing the bucket Danny was holding for him, he decided being tasked with washing out the pale and keeping Charlie’s glass full of Gatorade wasn’t such a bad thing after all. 

When Clara called Danny for her annual observance of Matt’s death, Steve took over Charlie duties.

“Hey, Ma,” Danny said into his phone, his voice sounding even more exhausted than he looked.  “No, it’s just a little crazy around here this morning.  So how was it?”

As Danny walked out into the living room, Steve settled in beside Charlie in his bed.  Eddie, who had taken up a vigil at Charlie’s feet sometime in the night, gave a sympathetic whimper.  Steve agreed with the sentiment.  The poor kid was still green around the gills but finally sleeping.  He just wished he and Danny could do the same.  Maybe after the call, if the vomiting had finally stopped, they could get a few hours themselves.  Maybe Danny’s nightmares would finally stop, as well, now that the date Reyes had given them that damn drum would finally be in the past for another year.

There was a part of Steve that kind of hated Danny’s brother.  Not necessarily for getting himself into a situation where he ended up dead, but for putting Danny in the predicament that he had.  Matt had pulled Danny into his mess by telling Reyes Danny knew where the money was, which was bad enough. What was worse, he’d done it knowing the stash was over five million dollars short, and that Danny didn’t have that kind of money lying around to make up the shortfall.  If Chin hadn’t managed to get them the rest, Reyes could have just as easily killed Danny over the missing money. Endangering his brother’s life, _Danny’s_ life, to try to save his own was something Steve couldn’t understand and he sure the hell couldn’t forgive it. So yeah, Steve kind of hated Matt for that.  He didn’t feel too bad about it, though, because he knew Danny kind of hated Steve’s mom for how she had a habit of pulling Steve into her shit, as well.

Unfortunately, Danny’s phone call lasted longer than Charlie’s nap.  When Steve noticed the little boy was awake, he rubbed his back.  “Hey, buddy, how you feeling?”

He was answered by a lapful of partially digested Gatorade.  At this point, he wouldn’t have expected anything less.

Eddie whoofed at him, and Steve couldn’t help but hear the humor in the bark.

“Little help?” Steve said to the dog, who immediately ran from the room.  “Coward!” Steve called after him.

Grace peeked into the room and asked, “You want me to stay with him while you change clothes?”

Steve honestly loved the hell out of Danny, but he still had no idea how such a sweet kid could be half his.  “It will only take a few minutes,” Steve promised.  “I’ll change, grab him some more Gatorade, and be right back.”

“We’re out of Gatorade,” she told him as she handed him a towel to mop up most of the mess.

“Okay, when your dad gets off the phone with your grandma, I’ll run to the store and get him some more.”

“Can I go?” She asked excitedly.  “Can I _drive_?”

“With as little sleep as I’ve had, kiddo, that’s probably a good idea.”  He’d stayed awake a lot longer than this on routine cases, but any time he could make Grace happy, he’d do it.

By the time he’d cleaned up, Danny was back in Charlie’s bed.

“Sorry, buddy, no practice for you today,” Danny was explaining. “Besides, I don’t think your soccer team would appreciate you throwing up all over the field.”

“Where’s Grace?” Steve asked.

“Getting dressed.  Said the two of you were making a resupply run.  She also said Charlie had shared the love.”  Danny waved at his own body to encompass the typical strike zone.

“Well, guess someone thought I was feeling left out.”  Steve winked at Charlie who was snuggled up against Danny looking miserable, whether the mood was from missing soccer practice or feeling like crap, Steve didn’t know. He moved to run his fingers through the mess of Danny’s hair.  “How are you?”

Danny gave a little shrug.  “Not going to lie, babe, I’ve been better.  But Ma doesn’t seem as bad this year.  Guess what they say about time and healing is true.”

“Listen, once we get this one on the mends,” Steve hitched his thumb at Charlie, who was already starting to fall asleep again, “I’ll set to work making you feel better.”

Danny tilted over until his head rested against Steve’s thigh. “Not sure when you’ll get the chance. Gatorade’s not doing the job with Charlie,” Danny told him with a worried scowl.  “I’ll call the pediatrician’s office; see if they can call in some drugs.”

Steve watched Danny’s eyes close as he rubbed his fingers soothingly into Danny’s scalp. “Gracie and I will hang out until you do, then we’ll pick them up while we’re out.”

Seeing as it was Saturday, it took almost an hour for the pediatrician’s answering service to call back and let them know the doctor had called in the prescription to the pharmacy. Grace had grabbed the keys to the Camaro as soon as the phone rang, and was sitting in the driver’s seat before Steve could even give Danny a soft kiss goodbye.

“Maybe she shouldn’t drive.”  Danny frowned as he watched Grace adjust the seat in the Camaro.  “It’s been raining most of the night, and the streets are probably pretty slick.”

“She lives in Hawai’i,” Steve reasoned.  “If she’s going to drive here, she needs to know how to drive in the rain.   She’ll be fine.  I’ll have her take it slow.”

“Slow for you is twice the posted speed limit, which, by the way, is legally binding and not just a suggestion.”

Steve failed to keep his lips from twitching, because, in good conscience, he couldn’t accuse Danny of exaggerating. “You worry too much,” he deflected.

“I have a teenage daughter and an insane boyfriend who are going off on some wild adventure together.  I worry exactly the right amount.” 

Steve ignored the insane comment; he was still too busy grinning at Danny’s use of boyfriend as his descriptor. It shouldn’t have made him as happy as it did, not after six months, but it did. It just fucking did make him happy, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought about that, even Danny.

Danny shook his head at the smitten expression on Steve’s face and mumbled, “Not only am I raising a teenage girl, apparently I’m also dating one trapped in the body of a Navy SEAL.”

Steve forced a frown. “Don’t say that out loud.”

“It’s the truth,” Danny challenged.

“Someone hears that out of context… dating a teenage girl…” Steve shook his head.  “Just don’t say that out loud.”

 “I’m saying it right here, to you, who not only understands the context, you _are_ the context.”

“There is no context,” Steve argued, mainly because he liked to argue with Danny. 

“You are the context,” Danny reiterated.  “You and your goofy face.”

Steve fought to maintain his best unit commander expression, which was not goofy in the least.  “It’s a completely fabricated, nonexistent context.”

Danny tilted his head quizzically.  “Are you saying you don’t exist?”

“I’m saying that I don’t act like a teenage girl running off to have some wild adventure.” Steve pointed out to the car where Grace sat waiting patiently.  “And since when does a grocery run qualify as a wild adventure?”

“Since you’re riding shotgun.  Grace,” Danny called from the front door, waiting until she lowered the window to hear him, “what’s the rule for driving with Uncle Steve?”

She rolled her eyes but yelled back, “Do as he says, not as he does.”

“Aaaand?” Danny coaxed.

“And if he says to do something,” Grace continued, “do just the opposite.”

“That’s my girl.”  Danny grinned at Steve’s scowl that he was no longer faking.

“It’s a good thing I love you,” Steve groused.

“Like I don’t know that.” Danny patted Steve’s chest. “And it’s a _great_ thing you love me.”

Danny was a total ass sometimes, like when he said shit like that and made it impossible for Steve to stay angry with him.

Steve was leaning in to kiss him again, when a miserable, “Danno?” drifted out of Charlie’s bedroom.

“Go,” Danny ordered, already turning toward the sickly voice.  “Before I make a break for the car and leave you with the human vomit factory.”

“Be back soon,” Steve promised, already heading out the door before Danny followed through with his threat.

As far as driving went, Grace wasn’t half-bad.  Although, considering how Steve’s driving test had gone, and the ridiculous rules the Hawaiian DMV wanted him to follow, Danny had made it crystal clear that Steve didn’t get a vote in when Grace would be ready to take her test… specifically because of Steve’s opinion on the ridiculous rules.

“Once we pick up the medicine and Gatorade for Charlie, let’s swing by my place so I can grab a few extra changes of clothes.”

Grace waited for the light to turn green before she asked, “So why don’t you and Danno move in together?”

“That’s a very good question, one you should probably ask your dad since he’s the one who doesn’t want to do it.”  It was a cheap shot turning Gracie loose on her dad, but Steve wasn’t above using every advantage he could get to convince Danny to move in with him.

“Why not?” Grace asked in surprise.

Steve shook his head.  “I really don’t know.  I think…I think he’s worried about uprooting you and Charlie.  I mean, you remember all those crappy apartments he lived in when he first moved here.”

Grace crinkled her nose, like she was smelling something rotten, something that smelled like a few of those apartments.

“When he found the place you have now,” Steve continued, “I think he felt like he’d found you guys a home, and that’s important to him, you know?  You’re important to him, and he just wants you to be happy.”

“You’re important to him, too,” she pointed out. “It seems like, if we’re all together, it doesn’t matter where that is, we’ll be happy.”

“I feel the same way, sweetheart.  We just need to convince your dad of that.”  Steve pointed ahead.  “The drugstore’s up here on the right.  It’s a tight parking lot.  Think you can handle it?”

“I got it,” she assured, and actually did a damn good job of parking…on the third try.

Steve waited for the prescription at the counter, and couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched.  For a split second, he thought he would turn around and see Charlie standing in the middle of the vitamin aisle quietly staring at him.   Instead, he saw an older lady with what looked to be her daughter waiting to turn in a prescription, a mother and small child in the cold medicine section, a guy about Steve’s age looking at shoe inserts…for a really long time.  Another man, probably related to the one with bad arches by the looks of him, sat at the blood pressure machine. Glancing up at the mirror above the counter, he saw the reflection of two other guys loitering near the entrance. One of them looked damned familiar, but Steve couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before. Four to his one, and him with Grace, who had just walked back up with her arms full of Gatorade.

When Grace said she was going to look at the magazine rack, Steve snagged her arm.  “Just wait here.  I’ll need some help carrying everything out.”

She gave him an odd expression, but thankfully didn’t argue and stayed put.  Pulling his phone, Steve asked, “Do you think we should get Charlie some of the blue Gatorade, too, or just stick with the orange?  Maybe I should text your dad and ask.”  Only instead of asking about drink colors, Steve texted:

‘pharmacy’

‘chicken salad’

A few minutes later, he still didn’t have a response back from Danny.  Danny had probably left his phone in the other room, or he was busy with Charlie, or four other sons of bitches had already burst into his house and taken him out.  Shit, he needed to get out of here and back to Danny, but at the same time, he needed to make sure Grace stayed safe.

The pharmacist appeared then, placing the prescription bottle in a small bag and stapling the directions for use to the outside.  “Here you go, Commander.  This should make him feels better.  Do you have any questions?”

“Yeah, can you go over this with me?” Steve gave a half laugh. “We’ve been up with the poor kid all night, and I can barely see straight to read this.”  

“Of course. That’s a nasty stomach flu; my daughter had it last week.  The good news is that the worst of it should be over in about a day.” The woman’s smile flittered nervously when Steve picked up a pen from the counter and wrote ‘silent alarm’, underlined it twice, then scribbled the notes she was giving him about the drugs in the margin of the paperwork.  Steve saw her hand move under the counter, and to her credit, she never stopped her explanation of how to administer the medication.

“Thank you,” he told her earnestly.  “You take care of yourself.”  Hopefully, by taking cover if this took a turn for the worse, Steve thought as he gathered up the bottles.

Handing the small bag with the drugs over to Grace, along with the car keys, Steve turned them toward the exit.  As he expected, the blood pressure checker and the guy with bad feet followed.  He ushered Grace out the front door and past the two there, as if he didn’t notice them.

He had definitely seen the one somewhere before. It was driving him nuts. Right now, though, he needed to concentrate on getting Grace out of here.

“Gracie, listen carefully,” he told her in a low whisper as he walked her across the parking lot and to the driver’s side of the car.  “Get in the car, start it up, and when I tell you to drive, you drive, and you don’t stop, no matter what happens, until you’re somewhere safe.”

She climbed in the car obediently, but still asked, “What’s wrong?”

Steve closed her door and walked to the passenger side, glancing over to see the four men crossing the parking lot in their direction. Grace followed his gaze and nodded wordlessly in understanding as soon as he opened the door and dropped the bottles on the seat there. 

“Buckle up,” he reminded Grace with a reassuring smile.  He opened the glove compartment and pulled out the spare Sig Sauer and extra magazine stored there.  “As soon as I shut this door, you drive. Okay?”

“What about you?” Grace asked, but thank God, she started the car.

Steve brushed off her question.  “Don’t worry about me.  You just drive.  Don’t stop.  Promise you’ll do that?”

She nodded in understanding, and Steve shut the door, turned with his gun in front of him, and shouted, “Five-0, show me your hands!”

Behind him, he heard the Camaro’s engine rev when Grace threw it into reverse the same time the four men all went for their guns.  Steve fired, moving away from the car in hopes of drawing their attention away from Grace and onto him.  He saw one assailant go down, but not before he felt the searing pain of a bullet just above his left hip bone.  He dove behind a car, glanced down, and saw his shirt already stained red with blood. 

Fuck. He’d just proven Danny’s wild adventure theory to be true and been shot in the process. As much as Danny liked being right, he wasn’t going to be happy about that. Steve heard the crunch of metal on metal and looked over to see Gracie back into another car, shift into drive, hit another car, then into reverse again.  Oh, Danny was _seriously_ not going to be happy about that.  Steve shot, Danny’s car wrecked… Steve was never going to get any ever again.

All thoughts of his pending lack of sex life vanished when one of the men started toward Grace.   With a grunt, Steve launched himself up onto, then immediately off, the hood of the car he was using as cover, and tackled the guy.  They landed hard on the pavement, and between his bruised ribs from the day before and the gunshot from moments ago, Steve couldn’t seem to catch his breath.  The kick to his stomach sure the fuck didn’t help matters.  He still had his hand wrapped around the grip of the Sig, which he lifted and fired.  He was rewarded with a groan of pain, then white-hot agony blazed through his right leg.  In the distance, he heard the approaching sirens of the HPD responding to the alarm in the pharmacy.

The men were arguing in Spanish, and Steve could just make out one of them ordering the others to get the girl.  Lifting his head, he saw Grace behind the wheel, eyes wide in terror as she looked between Steve on the ground and one of the men who ran toward her. 

“Gracie, drive!” Steve yelled, and please, please, please, despite what Danny said, now was not the time to do the opposite of what Steve told her to do.

The man closest to him, the one who looked so familiar, kicked Steve hard in the head. As he plummeted into suffocating blackness, he thought, maybe, he heard the sound of the Camaro’s wheels squealing as they accelerated away.


	2. Chapter 2

Chicken salad.

Chicken fucking salad.

It had taken them months to settle on a decent code word the entire team could remember and use correctly.   Steve, as usually, had wanted something from his Navy days…Alpha Tango Double Prime Bravo lockdown or some stupid shit like that.  Danny had argued it should be something that wouldn’t necessarily draw attention, something they could easily work into a conversation, because people with guns to your head ordering you to tell your partner everything’s okay kind of catch a clue when you throw words like zulu and foxtrot into a conversation.  Steve had agreed, reluctantly, and they’d settled on ‘I’ll be late for dinner’.  This worked fine until Danny forgot that was the code, texted it to Steve when he actually _was_ going to be late for dinner, and Danny had to explain to a hundred parents and the SWAT team that descended on Gracie’s cheer competition that it was all a misunderstanding.

That’s when Steve had suggested chicken salad.  Honestly, Danny figured he’d said it as a joke.  It wasn’t long after the rather disastrous Valentine’s trip they had taken together with Lynn and Melissa that Steve recommended it, and Danny’s code word for wanting alone time was still fresh on Steve’s mind.  The fact that Steve had completely blown it off when Danny used it had still been fresh on Danny’s mind.

“What good is a code word you completely ignore?” Danny had demanded.  “I used it, and you didn’t leave!”

Steve had shrugged.  “It’s a terrible code word for making someone leave.  It’s a great one for drawing someone to you.”

“That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever,” Danny had countered.

“Sure it does.” As always, Steve was totally confident in his reasoning.  “Chicken salad is great! Who wants to leave chicken salad?  You hear chicken salad and you want to come to the chicken salad and eat it.”

“I have never once seen you eat chicken salad!” Danny accused.

“My mom makes a great chicken salad,” Jerry provided.

Chin agreed, “She really does.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with chicken salad,” Lou added.

“See?” Steve practically gloated.

At that point, Danny had looked pleadingly at Kono, hoping that at least she would have enough common sense to see what a ridiculous suggestion this was.

Kono had simply thrown her arms wide.  “Works for me.”

Danny waved an accusatory finger around the room.  “You’ve all been infected with Steve’s stupid.  Seriously, get a shot or something.”

So chicken salad became the code.

Now Steve had used the goddamn code word, chicken fucking salad, and wasn’t answering his cell fucking phone, and neither was Grace.  Danny still wasn’t sure how he’d missed the text when it had first come in fifteen minutes earlier, but he was sure it had something to do with the small boy he’d just seat-belted securely in the back seat of Steve’s truck with the barf bucket in his lap.

“Eddie, come on, time to go,” Danny coaxed, opening the passenger door of the Silverado.

Danny closed the door as soon as the dog was in the seat and anxiously pulled his ringing cell phone from his pocket.  His heart fell when it was neither Steve nor Gracie.

“Lou, I was just about to call you,” Danny blurted out in a rush.  “Steve and Grace are missing.  Steve chicken saladed me, and now he isn’t—“

“Grace is at our house,” Lou told him.

Danny actually had to steady himself against the hood of the truck at the relief he felt.  “Then where’s Steve?” 

“Danny, they were attacked-- four men at the drug store.  There was a gunfight, and Steve told Grace to drive away.  I think she end up turned around in her escape, but eventually recognized she was near our house, so she came here.  She’s shook up, but she’s not injured.”  When Danny didn’t answer, just held the phone in stunned silence, Lou asked, “Danny, did you hear me?”

“Yeah…yes.  Yes, I heard you.”  Danny cleared his throat, fought to focus and not fall prey to the all out emotional chaos that was threatening to engulf him.  “What about Steve?”

There was a pause.  “Grace says he’s been shot, but he was alive when she last saw him.”

Danny pushed a hand into his hair.  “Jesus, Lou, we need to call dispatch—“

“I already did,” Lou told him.  “Ends up Steve had the pharmacist trigger the silent alarm.  Units were on scene in about five minutes.  From what they told me, looks like our boy took out one of the assailants, but Steve and the other three were gone.”

“Gone?  What do you mean, gone?  As in they took him, or he ran them down with a bullet in him like the idiot that he is, and now he’s lying in some ditch bleeding out?”

“They took him, Danny.  Witnesses say they saw them putting him in a van…APB is already out on it,” Lou added before Danny could ask. ”But that’s good news.  Okay?  They left their dead man behind but took Steve. That means they want him for something, which means they’ll need to keep him alive.”

“Who wants him?” Danny demanded, and so much for holding back the panic.  “And for what?  He’s out there somewhere, bleeding to death from a fucking gunshot wound!”

“We’re going to figure that out.  Okay? But there’s something else.”

“Sorry, no.  No. I won’t be handling anything else today.”  Danny had thought he’d reached his emotional and psychological limit in the past.  He was wrong.  Now, with what was happening right this minute, with what had happened four years ago this very goddamn day, he truly thought he was going to lose his shit, and lose it but good.

“Danny Williams, you listen to me,” Lou snapped.  “You are a decorated member of the elite Five-0 task force, a detective in the Honolulu Police Department, and a damn good one at that.  You have a team of the best and brightest to back you up, and if anyone can find Steve it is you.  So nut up, brother, because we have work to do.”

Danny took a deep breath, pushed all the emotional shit as deep down as he could, and climbed into the driver’s seat.  “Gotta say, you really didn’t nail the landing on that one, Lou, but you made your point.  Call in the rest of the team, get me everything HPD has on the scene.  Bring Grace to the Palace, and I’ll have Rachel come pick up her and Charlie.”

“Call in Rachel, but she should probably stay at the Palace.  It’s the safest place,” Lou cautioned.  “Grace said the assailants were speaking Spanish, and she understood enough to hear them say they were supposed to take her _and_ Steve.  So if they wanted both of them…”

“They could want the rest of our family, too,” Danny finished the thought, as sickening as it was.

Son of a bitch, Steve wasn’t just calling for help; he was trying to warn Danny with that text.  There was no way in hell Danny was going to ignore it now.

Rachel was less than pleased with Danny’s career once again endangering _her_ children’s lives (her words).  She at least had the decency to be genuinely worried for Steve’s welfare, who also happened to be the love of Danny’s life (his words, which he enjoyed saying to his ex-wife probably more than he should have.)  At least a SWAT team in a locked down Palace safely guarded that part of his family, now he just had to concentrate on finding the other member.

Danny spared a few minutes doing his best to calm and reassure Grace she’d done exactly what she should have, and that, for once in his life, her Uncle Steve had been right when he told her to leave his sight.  Afterwards, Danny and Lou went to meet Tani and Junior at the crime scene.

Crime scene.  Christ, that was such a professional way of describing the place where his precious baby girl had nearly been kidnapped, and his partner had.

Danny tried his best to stay in cop mode, take in all the evidence without thinking too much about how that evidence had come to be.  The parking lot and adjacent street was full of HPD and CSI personnel. Danny knew that about a block away on the side of the road, one of these people had left an evidence marker next to a little bag containing Steve’s cell phone that the kidnappers had tossed as the van drove away.  Others were measuring tire tracks, flagging bullet casings, and photographing blood spatter, and fuck fuck fuck some of that blood had spattered out of Steve. This was business, all business, he reminded himself, and if he could keep it in that perspective, he had the track record to prove he could successfully close this case.

“We have an ID yet on that one?” Danny asked as he hitched his chin toward the body under the coroner’s blanket.

“Carlos Torres,” Tani told him.  “Jerry’s running his priors and known affiliations now.”

“Good,” Danny told her. “So, what else do we know?”

When Tani and Junior looked warily at Lou, Danny waved his arms. “Look, I appreciate the concern for my mental wellbeing, but if we’re going to find him, I need to know everything.  So, walk me through it.”

“Looks like the shot that took down Torres came from this area,” Junior told him, walking him behind a car to show where CSI had already flagged several casings.  Danny didn’t miss the smear of blood on the car door, the drops on the pavement, then the smudge on the hood along with a boot-sized dent. 

“So Steve was shot…,” Danny was rather proud of how level he kept his voice, “…took cover here, then did one of his typical leaping take-downs off the hood.” Danny was looking around, seeing what they might have missed.  “But why?  He was hurt, had cover, why expose himself again, especially when Grace… is that a bumper?”  He walked past half a dozen parking spaces to look down at the black car part lying on the pavement, noticed how several other cars in the immediate area exhibited damage, as well.  “Is that _my_ bumper?” 

Lou made a pathetic attempt at looking innocent.  “Oh, did I not mention the damage to the Camaro?”

“No,” Danny said in growing irritation, “you did not.”

“Looks like Grace had a little trouble getting out of her parking space,” Tani noted. “Which would explain why Steve would have tackled a guy if he was threatening her.”

Danny decided car damage aside, he still didn’t have the full story laid out in his head.  He squatted to the height Grace would have been at in the car.  “Grace said they shot Steve while he was on the ground.  She wouldn’t have had a clear view of that from here if Steve was shot before she got out of the parking space.”

“We think he was hit twice,” Junior told him, leading him over to where Eric knelt on the ground collecting samples.   “Once when the gun fire broke out, and then after he tackled the perp.”

“But he got off another shot here,” Eric told him, indicating two distinct areas of blood and multiple bullet casings.  “Two different blood types and two different calibers of bullets.  That one is the same as the ones behind the car, so that’s probably McGarrett’s.”

Danny didn’t miss the one Eric pointed out was beside the larger puddle of blood.  “Did you find the slug?”

Eric shook his head.  “It’s probably still in him.”

Danny felt the color drain from his face, and it must have showed.

“That could be a good thing,” Junior reassured.  “It can slow the bleeding and buy us some time.”

“Yeah,” Danny nodded as he pulled his ringing cell phone from his pocket.  “We’ll take it.”

Even though he knew Steve no longer had his phone, Danny couldn’t help the disappointment to see the display on his phone read ‘unknown number’.  He hit ignore, figuring it was just a robocall, or if not they’d leave a message, but before he could even put it away, the phone rang again with the same lack of identification.  Again he hit ignore, because, no, he didn’t need his carpets cleaned, or a warning about an overdue payment on a nonexistent credit card.  A few seconds later, his phone dinged with a text message, also from an unknown number.

‘Ciicken Saalac’

Holy shit, Steve!

The phone rang again, and Danny immediately answered.  “You son of a bitch, this better be you.”

“Danny,” Steve breathed in obvious relief.

“Steven, where—,” Danny started, and everyone gathered around trying to hear.

Only Steve asked anxiously, “Grace?”

“She’s fine,” Danny assured him, moving to put the phone on speaker so the rest of the team could hear. “Worried about you, but fine.”

“Thank God,” Steve said, still sounding breathless.  “What about you and Charlie?”

“He’s fine, too. We both are.  He stopped puking once the drugs took effect,” Danny told him.  “But could you, please, for one minute stop worrying about everyone else, and tell me where the hell you are?”

“Don’t know,” Steve admitted. “Woke up here, found this phone, called you.”

Lou was already telling Tani, “Call Jerry.  Have him trace the incoming call on Danny’s phone. Alright, Steve, just hold tight,” Lou said loud enough Steve could hear him. “We’re going to trace the call and find you. Okay?”

“I can get behind that plan,” Steve told them, then asked hesitantly, as if he was afraid to hear the answer.  “Danno, you’re telling me the truth about Gracie, right?  I mean, there were bullets flying, and she was trying to back out… she really didn’t get hurt?”

“I swear to you, she’s fine,” Danny reassured.  “Or she will be when we get you home.  Can’t say the same for my car.”

Okay, it was a jab, but Steve sounded like he needed some reassurance about the kids, and he’d know that Danny wouldn’t be wasting time bitching about the Camaro if they weren’t safe.

Steve gave a weak snort.  “Sorry about that.”

“Yeah? Well, not as sorry as you’re going to be about your truck.”

Any hint of apology left Steve’s voice.  “What did you do to my truck?”

“ _I_ didn’t do anything,” Danny countered.

“You’re saying something happened while you _weren’t_ driving it?”

“The only reason I was driving _your_ truck was because you took _my_ car, like you _always_ do.”

“Grace is more comfortable driving—“

“So now it’s Grace’s fault?”

“No, it’s _your_ fault since you were driving _my_ truck at the time.”

“Well it’s _your_ fault that _your_ dog is a sympathetic puker.”

“Jesus, that smell will never come out,” Steve groaned, which morphed into a different kind of pain.

“How are the GSWs?” Danny asked, all thoughts of vehicle damage gone. There was a pause, and Danny could almost hear the hamster wheels in Steve’s idiot brain trying to decide the best way to deflect answering that question. “Steven, I am literally, at this very moment, standing over a puddle of your blood, so do not even think of lying to me.”

“One on my hip, it’s just a deep graze,” Steve said.  “Bleeding’s slowed on it.  But my leg…that one’s giving me a little more trouble.”

If Steve was admitting he was in trouble, then it was bad.  Really bad.  The kind of bad Danny didn’t want to the think about much less be experiencing right now.

“Commander, have you tried a tourniquet?” Junior asked.

“The one I’m using isn’t exactly cutting it,” Steve finally confessed.  “Don’t worry; I’ve got some other ideas.”

“Sure, nothing to worry about,” Danny scoffed. “Sounds like you’ve got this all under control, so maybe we’ll just kick back with a few beers and see you when you get back.”

“Danny, this is not my first rodeo, you know that.” Danny did know that, but talk of tourniquets not working didn’t make him feel any better.  Steve’s voice never lost its confidence.  “When you figure out where I am, I’ll be waiting for you when you get here. Okay?”

Rubbing at his forehead, Danny promised, “Just hold on, babe. As soon as Jerry gets a location, we’ll be there.”

Tani, however, was shaking her head.  “Jerry says he can’t trace it.  It’s not calling over a cell tower.  He thinks it’s probably on a voice over IP computer connection somehow.”

“Well, that kind of sucks,” Steve noted, and Danny couldn’t have agreed more.

“Commander, turn off the Wi-Fi on the phone,” Junior suggested.  “Maybe that will push it to work off a cell tower.”

“It’s just a little flip phone,” Steve told them.  “Haven’t seen one like this in years.”  From the change in his voice, it sounded like he’d moved the phone away to look at it more closely. “Do you know how hard it was to text using just the number keys?   Hey, Danny? ” 

Shit, Danny knew that tone.  Nothing good ever came after that sort of ‘Hey, Danny?’  That was the ‘Hey, Danny? Hand me that car battery while I defuse this nuclear bomb,’ or ‘Hey, Danny? I’m about to jump onto a speeding truck from the top of a highway tunnel.’  He might as well have been saying, ‘Hey, Danny? Don’t freak out, but I’m facing something that even I find scary, and I’m glad you’re here with me so I don’t feel like I’m going it alone.’  It was as endearing as it was traumatizing.

This time was no exception.  “It looks like I’m on the last of the battery on this thing.”

Not exactly, ‘Hey, Danny? I’m going to try to blow a hole in this rubble with a handmade bomb to get us out of here,’ but it honestly scared Danny more than a lot of the other times.

“Wait, sir, did you send a text?” Junior asked.

“Yeah,” Danny informed him, “he texted me right before I answered the phone.”

Junior was nodding enthusiastically. “We might be able to track the IP address from the text.  That might not give us an exact location, but it could give us a good start.”

“Jerry’s on it,” Tani informed them as she talked to their other teammate on her phone.

“Okay, in the meantime, you need to tell us anything that could help us find you,” Lou cut in.  “Anything you can see or hear.”

“I’m in a basement room, I can’t really see anything.  Looks like it’s a storage room, maybe. Concrete walls, some empty shelves, not much else. Kind of hot in here. There’s a window high up I can’t reach.  Too small to climb out of anyway.”

“Okay, what about sounds,” Lou coaxed.  “Do you hear anything?”

“All I can hear is the rain.”

“Rain?” Danny demanded, looking up into a cloudless blue sky.

“Yeah, the rain.  It just started up a minute ago.”

“Babe, there’s no rain.  Hasn’t been any since last night.”

“Danny, I can see it hitting the window.  It’s definitely raining where I am.”

Danny pointed frantically.  “Junior, check your phone, see if it’s raining anywhere on the island.”

Lou was looking over the younger man’s shoulder as he pulled up a weather app.  “Nowhere on Oahu.   The only place I see rain anywhere is on the Big Island. Most of the southern half is getting light showers right now.”

“The Big Island?”  As much as Danny tried to keep his panic at bay, there was no stopping it now.  The Big Island was…fuck, it was _big_.  Danny was worried Steve didn’t have the time it would take to search an island that fucking big.  “Is it even possible for him to be there?  It’s only been about an hour or so since this all went down.”

“You can fly there in about forty, forty-five minutes,” Tani pointed out.  “If they had transportation standing by, and it was close, you maybe could.”

“It would have to be incredibly close,” Danny concluded.  “We need to look at where anything might have taken off within a fifteen minute drive of the pharmacy. If we find a record of the flight, we can maybe find out who did this and where they would have taken him.”

“On it,” Eric promised, pulling a laptop out of his bag.  “Given where we found the cell phone, they were heading south when they left the parking lot.  I’ll start the search in that direction.”

“One of the guys who attacked us, he looked familiar.” Steve sighed in frustration.  “I just can’t remember where I’ve seen him before.”

“The guy you shot, Carlos Torres, ring any bells?” Lou asked.

“No, I don’t…Shit, the phone is beeping,” Steve told them.  “The battery…I’m going to lose you soon.  Danny?”

“Listen, we’re going to find you,” Danny promised, denying every instinct that was screaming this could be the last time he ever spoke to Steve.  However, Steve was always saying Danny should be more positive, and with very few exceptions, he’d been right, because it had always worked out.

“Hey, you give Grace and Charlie a hug for me. Alright?  I lov—“

Danny waited a beat, waited for Steve to finish saying ‘love you guys’ like he did every time they dropped the kids back at Rachel’s, every time he left on Reserve Duty, every time he just damn well felt like it, which was a lot.   Danny, however, could already see his phone had disconnected as soon as the battery died on Steve’s.  He looked up from the phone in his hand when Lou squeezed his shoulder.

“You’re right; we’re going to find him,” the large man assured.

“Whoever did this, they’re toying with us.” Danny told his teammate.  “Steve’s phone ditched, then he’s shot and put in a room with a flip phone that was on its last few minutes of battery life.  Just enough time to…”

Fuck, to say goodbye.

Lou must have seen the despair that realization caused on Danny’s face.  He squeezed Danny’s shoulder again.  “That means they’re arrogant, and arrogant people make mistakes.”

“They sure the fuck made a mistake taking Steve.”

“Amen to that,” Lou agreed whole-heartedly, the same time Junior chimed in with “Damn straight they did.”

Danny crammed the phone back in his pocket, along with his hands, and took a deep breath.  Time to go back into cop mode.  “Alright, Tani, Junior, walk me through the rest of the scene.”

~H50~H50~H50~H50~H50~

Tani tapped Junior’s shoulder to let him know she was in position.  She watched as her teammate moved smoothly through the entrance foyer of the mansion and into the living room that was larger than her entire house.  Junior practically glided along the inlaid marble floors, his legs easing down into a crouch, as if he were ready to spring on any enemy that might cross his path.  It always reminded Tani of how a predator moved, sleek and agile and dangerous, not to mention it made Junior’s ass look even more amazing than it normally did. And that…that was something she shouldn’t be thinking about right now, but seriously, there is was, right there in front of her as he moved with a stealth she actually envied. It had to be something he learned as a SEAL.  Even Steve, as old as he was, moved like he wasn’t wearing nearly the amount of bulky gear and weaponry he did on any given day.

Steve.

Christ, what a cluster fuck that was, this all was.   How Danny was holding it together half as well as he was remained a totally mystery to Tani given how worried she was, and she wasn’t even sleeping with their missing boss.  Although, Danny and Steve weren’t just having sex, those two were in love.  Honest to God, deeply committed, in love with each other.  Not that Tani hadn’t quickly caught on to how close Danny and Steve were when she started up with Five-0, not that she hadn’t suspect there might be some late night fooling around between buddies going on.  Hell, she’d been the one to accuse them of flirting in the first place, but to see them together, openly in a real relationship, that she hadn’t expected.

As Lou had put it after the two finally did decide to give it a go, “They’ll either kill each other in the first six weeks, or they’re in it for life.   Either way, it should be a little quieter around the office.”

It wasn’t.

The arguments didn’t stop, Steve doing superhero stunts didn’t stop, and Danny yelling at him for being a crazy person for doing them didn’t stop either. The only thing that did change was that they went home together every night, and, really, that wasn’t much of a change either.

Even Junior, when he was still living at Steve’s place, had once made a comment about how Danny always seemed to be at Steve’s until Junior went to bed, then was often already back when he came back from his morning run.  That was even supposedly before they started having sex. Of course, Junes would never, even under extreme duress, say anything that might make Steve look bad, so Tani’s pushing for more information at the time hadn’t panned out.  Granted, Steve and Danny always carpooled, so she could maybe see one not wanting to drive the other home after a really long day, but seriously, had they never heard of Uber?

Now there were no secrets, no denying it, even to themselves. What was maybe the strangest thing was that they seemed happy, genuinely happy.  For two men who spent most of the day at each other’s throats, it was hard to imagine them settling into domestic bliss.  Yet, there was no way anyone could deny the truth of it if they had ever seen the way they looked at each other after sharing a quick kiss when Danny handed over his beer while Steve tended the grill.  Tani didn’t consider herself a sentimental, hearts and flowers type, but she kind of melted a little inside to see that.

Pausing when Junior held up his hand, Tani could hear voices at the top of the stairs. Hopefully, it was their suspect.  Danny and Lou should be in position by now, so she and Junior slipped silently back into the entranceway when the men started down the stairs.

As soon as they heard Danny yelling, “Five-0!” she and Junior joined the show.

“Uh, uh, uh,” Lou was warning, as the man further up went for his gun. “Put that on the floor nice and slow.”

The older of the two men was Ernesto Ramos, a gunrunner who split his time between Central America and Hawai’i moving military surplus guns between North America and Asia.  He was in his late forties, but wearing a tight fitting shirt and jeans meant for a man half his age despite the sprinkling of grey in his otherwise dark hair.  Tani had never had a run in with the man, but he’d plead a deal a few years prior after Five-0 had arrested him. He gave them information on another gunrunner who was moving RPGs for Somali terrorists in exchange for dropping the charges.  From what Lou had told them on the drive over, Ramos wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he could still do some damage.

Ramos nodded to the younger man, who did as Lou ordered and dropped the gun.  Ramos, for his part, held up his hands.  “I don’t have a beef with Five-0.”

Danny sprinted up the four steps between him and the Salvadorian gunrunner and grabbed him by the shirt collars. “You do now,” Danny ground out, before throwing him down the stairs and to the marble floor to land and Lou’s feet.

When the man behind Danny started to reach for him, Tani pointed her gun.  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?  Get your ass down here.”

The man complied, stepping warily over his boss on the floor, and Tani motioned him to sit on a stool at the wet bar off to the side of the room.

Danny was squatted over Ramos, his gun in Ramos’ face.  “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Ramos insisted, but he didn’t even ask whom Danny was talking about, so he obviously knew more than he was saying.

“Wrong answer,” Danny told him, pressing the gun against his forehead.

“I swear to you, I don’t know!”  Ramos was looking desperately to the other team members for them to stop Danny from killing him on the spot.   Tani wasn’t worried about that…at least not yet, seeing as Ramos was their only lead to Steve’s whereabouts.

“Your men took him,” Lou reminded Ramos.

After running through all his known associations, and there had been plenty, Carlos Torres had landed most recently on Ramos.  Grace had been able to identify two more men from photos, also in the employee of the gunrunner.  Jerry had called with the news before they even made it back to the office, and they’d come straight to Ramos’ house from the crime scene.

“Because they had to,” Ramos insisted.  “That bitch had photos that could get me killed.”

Photos?

Danny blinked, reaching the same conclusion Tani did, and seemed to wilt a little at the realization.

“Elena Alejandro.”  Danny rubbed at his forehead with a gloved hand and finally regained his feet. “We fucking had her.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Ramos told them.  “She said her name was Maria; pretty, like model pretty, you know?  Late-thirties maybe, long dark hair.  She reminded me of an actress from an old telenovella _mi abuela_ would watch when I was a kid.” 

“So what did they do with McGarrett?” Danny demanded.

 “They took him to the Kapahula Shopping Center, left the van parked near the Safeway like they were supposed to, and that was it,” Ramos insisted, obviously leaving out some key information.

“There’s no place to land a helicopter there,” Junior noted.  “She must have taken him somewhere else.”

Ramos looked genuinely confused about the helicopter comment.

Lou was already calling back to HQ.   “Jerry, get all the video feed you can from every store at Kapahula Shopping Center.  ATMs, traffic cams.  Everything.  Our van was parked there with Steve left in it.”

“How did you even know he was at the pharmacy?” Danny asked.

Ramos sighed, realizing he wasn’t going to get out of telling the whole story.  “My guys were supposed to follow him…you…all of you, to the soccer field.  Two more were already there waiting, but you never showed.  The ones on your house followed McGarrett and the girl to the drug store, only McGarrett made them, killed Carlos, and the girl got away.”

“You were supposed to take out my entire family?” Danny was pacing dangerously, finally stopping to point his gun once more at Ramos.

Tani could see Junior preparing to tackle their teammate, if necessary, to keep him from killing Ramos where he lay.

“She has photos of me!” Ramos tried to justify, yet again.  “I thought she was looking for money, but she said she’d release them to certain people, dangerous people, if I didn’t give her some men to help her with her plan. I didn’t have a choice!”

“Tell it to the judge,” Lou snarled.

“I told you, I don’t have a beef with Five-0,” Ramos tried again. 

“Oh, so that wasn’t you shooting at us four years ago when we arrested you?” Lou challenged.

“That was business, nothing personal.” Ramos turned to appeal to Danny. “And we were supposed to take them alive,” he said, as if that would make everything okay.  “And not you, just McGarrett and the kids.” 

Danny’s eyes widened in shock at that news, and Ramos was obviously a dumbass if he thought that would help his case with Danny. 

“Look, I’m as much a victim as you,” Ramos declared. 

Tani actually barked a laugh at that.  Danny, on the other hand, looked like he was going to pick him up and throw him down the stairs again, only this time from the top step.   

Ramos blurted.  “I have one of my best men dead, another with a clean record burned. I wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t life or death.”

Tani knew who the dead man was, but… “How did your guy get burned?”

“The metal detectors at your offices.  He had to carry in a gun; pretend it was a mistake. They let him off with a warning, but now he’s in the police records.”

“She was testing us, seeing how we’d respond,” Junior sounded as frustrated as Danny with how they’d been played.

“Yeah, but why test Palace security if she’s not planning to make a move there?” Tani asked.

They all looked to Ramos, who grimaced where he lay on the floor.  “I have two guys at the Palace covering the back entrance.”

“Just the back?” Junior sounded as perplexed as Tani felt.

“That was our assignment.  The others have the front.”  Before anyone could ask, Ramos raised his hands. “I don’t know who they are.  But if she had blackmail material on me, I’m sure she’s got it on others.”

“Call them off,” Lou ordered.

“She still has the photos,” Ramos defended.

“And I have a gun,” Danny reminded with a waggle of the one he held.  “Call them the fuck off.”

“Okay, okay.” He looked to his man still sitting at the bar, who eased a cell phone from his pocket.

“Sir,” Junior interrupted.  “Maybe we should leave them in place so she doesn’t know we’re on to her.  Otherwise, we don’t know what she’ll do to Steve.”

“Yeah, okay, good point, Junior,” Danny admitted then turned to the guy with the phone.  “Tell them to hold position, but don’t make a move if the order comes.”

“I’ll let SWAT know,” Lou assured.  “See if they can identify the others staking out the building.”

Danny leaned down and pulled Ramos to his feet by his shirtfront.  “And you are going to tell me where to find Alejandro.”

“I don’t know,” Ramos said once again.

Tani, apparently, wasn’t the only one tired of hearing that answer from the man.

“I seriously do not have the time or the patience for your bullshit right now,” Danny warned.  “You are looking at accessory to kidnapping and attempted murder, but if Steve McGarrett dies, I swear you won’t live long enough to stand trial, because I will kill you myself.”

Danny said it simply, just stating facts, like he was telling Ramos what he planned to eat for lunch today, but Tani didn’t doubt for one minute Danny would carry out the threat.

“I can try to contact her,” Ramos offered.  “I have an email address.  She refuses to use a personal phone, says they’re too easy to trace.  That’s the best I can do.”

“She may not like to use it, but she has a phone,” Tani countered.  “We found it in her backpack.”

Danny nodded. “Do it, set up a meeting, as soon as possible.  Tell her you’re pissed about your dead guy and are going to pull the rest if she doesn’t meet.”

“I’ll look at any emails he’s received already.” Junior offered. “See if there’s a connection between those IP addresses and Steve’s text.”

“Thanks, Junior,” Danny said, the exhaustion and worry seeping back into his voice as he moved to the other side of the room.

Tani hesitated to follow, thinking maybe Danny needed a minute to himself, but finally decided she was being too chicken shit to say what she should.

“Hey,” she called, slowing her pace and taking a single, tentative step forward when he looked over his shoulder.  “You doing okay?”

Danny gave a little snort. “You want the cop answer or the truth?”

Tani shrugged. “I don’t know; what would Steve want?”

Danny studied her for a few seconds before finally shaking his head with a grin.  “You know, I used to think you were just like Steve with your crazy driving and the way you jump without looking, but the more I’m around you, I see myself, too.”

“Wow,” Tani said as she moved a step closer.  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“If you ask me? Yes, I think that’s a compliment.  Ask someone else? Eh, your mileage may vary,” he admitted with a wobble of his head.  “But you and me, we have smart brains and smarter mouths, but our hearts… they can get us into some big time trouble.” 

“Really?”  Tani scoffed with raised eyebrows.  “How’s that?”

“See, we love our families to a fault, to the point we can’t see how our stupid-ass brothers are ruining their lives until it’s too late.  Or almost too late in your case, and I’m glad Koa got his head on straight and didn’t fuck up your life by losing his.  I genuinely am.  I wish I could say the same about Matt.”

Tani hadn’t been around when Matt Williams was in the picture, or when he horrifically left it. Steve had mentioned once that Danny had lost his brother to a Colombian drug dealer and nothing more.  When he’d spent most of the past week shooting worried looks in Danny’s direction, Tani had asked Lou what the deal was. Lou had told her a little about Matt, a buttload of stolen drug money, and what Reyes had eventually done to Danny’s brother.  He’d said Reyes had ended up shot by Danny, and that the anniversary of their hellacious trip to Colombia was actually today.  Tani still remembered the gut punch fear she’d felt when Koa nearly O.D.ed,  and how the memory of it came back now and then when she was working a case.  She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Danny to have the memory of his brother’s death mucking around in his head while also worrying about Steve. 

Danny shook his head, as if to clear it of his own memories, and continued.  “So we love our families something fierce, to the point that we hold back with everyone else, and I don’t know why we do that, honest to God I don’t.  Then sometimes… sometimes someone, or a few someones, eat under our skin, and weasel into our hearts until we wake up one morning and realize they’re family, too.  And if we’re really lucky, or unlucky depending on how you look it, one of those someones stops being just a someone, stops being just family, and becomes everything. Every fucking thing in my world, and I look back and I wonder, ‘why did I take so goddamn long to figure this out?’  Jesus, was I really that scared of being this happy?”

Tani didn’t miss how Danny had moved from talking about a generic ‘we’ to a very personal and very possessive tone when talking about Steve.  Even with his team around him, she could tell that deep down, Danny was viewing this as his case alone to get Steve back.  If he didn’t succeed, she also knew he’d put all the fault on himself. 

As if he was embarrassed that he’d said as much as he had, Danny cleared his throat, stood a little straighter.  “Of course, it could be because that one someone was too stupid to figure it out either, but I guess you can’t really blame him for that.  Although you can blame him for making the entire house smell like old sweat socks by microwaving eggs when a normal, sane person can crack one in a pan and scramble it up in less time than it takes to set the goddamn timer."   Danny shook his head in a long-suffering manner.  “My point is, Tani, if you can figure it out in less than eight years, do it.  Because it’s not like you’re going to run out of love, but sometimes you just run out of time.”

Tani placed a hand on Danny’s forearm and squeezed.  “Steve’s not going to run out of time, Danny.”

“I thought I had a few hours to spare with Matty, ends up I was already two weeks late,” Danny confessed then rubbed at his eyes.  “Fuck, I can’t… I can’t go through that again, not with Steve.”

“Hey, we have a solid lead on who’s behind this,” Tani reminded.  “The best lead we’ve had all day.  We found Alejandro once, we’ll find her again.”

“Now that, that sounds like Steve,” Danny told her.

Maybe she had taken a cue from the boss on a few things.  She’d watched as Steve and Danny had looked over the negatives and photos they’d taken from Alejandro’s hotel room.  Danny held them up to the light while Steve crowded in over his shoulder.  Tani had received a stern warning look from the two of them when she couldn’t hold in a snicker at the way they both pinked as they looked at the photos of them in the beach chair.  She’d bit her lip and did her best to look remorseful, dropping her eyes as theirs returned to the negatives.  That allowed her to see the way Steve’s hand brushed ever so lightly against Danny’s hip, and Danny, in response, leaned back a little more into Steve’s space. Up until then, Tani had thought of those images as nothing more than her bosses getting a little adventurous with their sex life.  At that moment, however, she saw it as something more, something shared and intimate, and as hokey as it sounded, precious.

“There are photos of a lot more than just us and the kids,” Danny had admitted, sounding almost disappointed.

“Hey, that’s a good thing,” Steve had consoled, playing his role as the optimist in their partnership. “That means as crappy as it is that the magazine wants to do a story on us, that’s all it is.  She’s not a physical threat to the kids.  And if they do end up doing a story about us, so what?  We got the racy photos, so they can only print ones of us looking like a happy family.  Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

Danny had looked back over his shoulder with a soft smile. “No, there’s definitely nothing wrong with that.”

Ends up Steve had been wrong about Alejandro being a physical threat; Tani just hoped like hell she hadn’t been wrong in her reassurances of finding the woman again.

Junior joined them as he disconnected his phone.  “It looks like the text from Steve and the email Ramos received both came from the same main server.  I have Jerry looking into it now.”

“Still nothing on how they may have gotten Steve to the Big Island?” Danny asked, with little hope in his voice.

Junior shook his head. “Eric came up with nothing with legitimate airfields, so he’s running through social media now.  Maybe if it was a helicopter landing on a beach or street, someone saw it and posted something.”

Even Tani thought that was a longshot.

Danny seemed to be thinking through their options.  “Listen, seems to me that most of what we’re doing right now is better done at the tech table, and I’d feel better being with the kids.  So let’s quietly haul Ramos in, use the back doors where his own men are sitting, and that way you two can help Jerry with all the computer search mumbo jumbo.”

Before they started back to the Palace, Tani snagged Danny’s arm.  “So, you remember what you said about people weasling into our hearts to become family?  Well, you’re pretty good at weasling, you and Steve both.”

Danny gave a hint of a genuine smile.  “You aren’t so bad at it yourself, rookie. But if you ever call me Uncle, I’ll kick your ass into next week. ” He hitched his head.  “Come on, we got work to do.”

Danny’s smile, however, vanished when his phone pinged with a new text.  His face went ashen when he opened it.

“Danny?” Tani asked in worry, only to feel the blood drain from her own face when he turned the phone to show her the image on the screen.  There was Steve, face down on the floor, unconscious…he had to be unconscious and not dead.  They’d just talked to him for fuck’s sake; he couldn’t be dead.

“They could have taken that before,” Tani tried to justify, “before he called, when they dumped him and he was still out.”  Or they could have come in after the call and killed him, she told herself, knew that was the same thought running through Danny’s head right now.  Shaking her head in denial of her own fears, Tani insisted, “They are just fucking with you, fucking with all of us.  Look, there’s no tourniquet on his leg.  He said he made a tourniquet.”   Or Steve had flat out lied to make Danny feel better.  Damn, maybe she was more like Danny than she thought with her brain automatically going to the worst option.

“Fucking with us.” Danny didn’t look convinced that’s all they were doing.  “I gotta say, rookie, they’re definitely succeeding.”


	3. Chapter 3

When Steve had awakened lying face down on concrete, the first thing he had noticed was the phone maybe a foot away from his nose.  Through the haze, he’d quickly come to two conclusions—it was definitely not his and it was probably older than Grace.

Grace!

He pushed up and regretted it instantly when he once again felt the searing pain of two bullet wounds.  Rolling to his back with a grunt, he called, “Grace?” not sure if he hoped he’d get a response.  Because if he did, that would mean they’d taken her, too, but if his only answer was silence, it could mean any damn thing…she’d gotten away, she’d been taken but was being held elsewhere, or she was…okay, not going down that rabbit hole.  Steve suddenly had a much better understanding of why Danny’s brain automatically went to the worst possible option. 

Must be a dad thing.  While Steve would never claim to be Grace or Charlie’s dad, would never try to take that right or honor away from Danny, who had earned every second of that title, Danny had let Steve dive into the deep end of those responsibilities from the moment they’d told Grace and Charlie they were dating.

Dating.  That didn’t come close to describing this thing they had.  Even Grace had rolled her eyes and asked, “Are you taking him to prom, Danno?”

Danny had shot Steve a grin at the question.  “Maybe I will.”  Then he leaned over and into a warm kiss to Steve’s lips.

They’d only been kissing for a little over a day at that point, and Steve thought he was already addicted to the act.  He had no doubt the craving for more showed when he smiled at Danny.

Charlie had groaned and covered his eyes.  “Are you going to do _that_ now?”

“Yes,” Danny told him.  “Is that a problem?”

“You’re going to make _babies_?” Charlie had demanded.

Steve witnessed something he rarely had in the past-- Danny Williams left speechless.  Steve didn’t really blame him given how many things Charlie managed to get wrong about human reproduction in that one statement.

“We’ll take precautions,” Danny finally promised before offering, “Now, who wants to help me make the pizza dough?”

Charlie had cheered and run from the room.  Danny had waved a hand in the direction his son had disappeared.  “Grace, make sure he actually washes his hands and doesn’t just turn on the faucet and glance at the soap dispenser.”  As soon as Grace left the room, Danny had stood and declared, “That, I think, went well, my son’s complete misunderstanding of how sex works aside.”

Steve had stepped into Danny’s space with a smartass grin.  “Come here.  I want to make a baby.”

Danny had kissed him, warm and soft and full of promises of a hell of a lot more, but briefly since there were pizzas to make.  When he pulled away, he patted Steve’s chest.  “You laugh, but you get to give him the sex talk.”

“There’s something about storks, right?” Steve called after Danny as he started for the kitchen. “Maybe cabbage leaves involved in there somewhere?”

Danny had simply flipped him off over his shoulder, which Steve supposed must have counted as the precautions Danny had mentioned.

So, yeah, regardless of what they called it, Steve was in this parenting thing all the way.  Not that he hadn’t helped Danny out when he’d needed it in the past.  It’s just that they had gone from Danny asking, “Could you do me a favor and pick up Grace, I have an appointment?” to Steve checking the master calendar in Danny’s kitchen and automatically saying, “I’ll get Grace while you’re at the dentist.”

Steve loved every minute of it.  Every time he had to play taxi for Grace as she went from mall to beach to the movies.  Every time he played crazy eights with Charlie and the rules changed depending on what cards the boy had in his hand at the time. Even every time he’d cleaned out the puke bucket this morning, because it just meant he and Danny were in this thing together, and that Danny trusted him with the two most important people in his life.

Steve hoped he hadn’t fucked up and ruined that trust this morning by letting their assailants capture Grace or worse.

Glancing at his watch, he saw it had been about forty-five minutes since things went sideways at the pharmacy.  Danny would no doubt be losing his mind right about now, that was if he hadn’t had similar things going down at his house.  Steve eyed the phone just within arm’s reach-- the phone obviously left by whoever had taken him, and left for him to use.  That fact alone was setting off all sorts of alarm bells.  They had to know Danny was the first person he’d call, which meant either they didn’t care, or they _wanted_ him to call Danny.  If they wanted it, he shouldn’t do it.

He could call Lou, though. Flipping open the phone he saw it had one programmed predial- Danny. Every time he tried to dial any other number, it wouldn’t go through. Yeah, they really wanted him to call Danny, and that just meant he couldn’t. _Wouldn’t_ do it.

Besides, he needed to figure out what was going on here. With a groan, Steve managed to get his feet under him to stagger to the door where he had to brace himself for a minute until the room stopped spinning. As expected, he found the door locked. He banged on it with the hand still gripping the flip phone and yelled in an attempt to get the attention of any guard that might be out there, maybe find out who the hell was behind this and why and if they’d taken Grace. If anyone was out there, they ignored Steve’s calls.

Looking down, he saw where a puddle of red had already formed on the floor the short time he’d been standing.  He needed to do something about the bleeding from his leg or it wasn’t going to matter what was going on here. The bullet was still in him, it hurt like fucking hell, and it was bleeding more than it should have been unless the bullet had nicked something important.  It took him a few tries to ease his belt out of the loops. For some reason the room kept threatening to go black, and he found himself on the floor once more, this time slumped against the wall. Once he had the belt off, he wrapped it around his leg and pulled it as tight as possible.  Not exactly a proper tourniquet, but hopefully it would slow things enough to form a clot. 

Next, he lifted his shirt to look at the wound on his side.  It was still slowly seeping blood, but not enough to cause too much worry.  It was hard to see from his angle, but it appeared to be nothing more than a deep groove above his hipbone. 

Danny loved that spot, was maybe a little obsessed with it.  Steve didn’t mind one bit, encouraged it even, with low slung board shorts, or his sweats tied loose enough that they rode down to sit precariously on his hips. Danny took the bait every damn time, attending to the spot with a wicked combination of fingers, lips, and tongue.

The night after Danny had been in the explosion, the night after Steve had spent hours earlier in the day thinking Danny was dead, the night their friends had gathered on the lanai with beers, and shrimp plates, and laughter, and absolute relief that Danny was still alive, Danny claimed that spot.

Steve had spent most of the evening playing host.  He made sure everyone always had a drink, took the time to chat and joke, and still never let Danny drift further than his peripheral vision or beyond arm’s length. He’d made sure of that last by reaching out to touch him regularly, convince himself that  Danny was still there, still alive.  Danny, God love him, had moved in closer each time to brush up against Steve’s shoulder as he talked to Lou, rest a hand on Steve’s lower back while Tani told a ridiculous story from her lifeguard days, or drop a kiss on the nape of Steve’s neck as he bent looking in the fridge for another beer for Junior. 

After a while, Danny had settled on the sofa on the lanai arguing with Kamekona about the proper way to chop garlic.  Steve had waited patiently for all of five minutes for Danny to return to his side, before crossing the lanai and sitting on the arm of the sofa to rest his hand right behind Danny’s head and join in on the argument. Danny insisted on the paper-thin slices to best distribute the flavor, whereas Kamekona and Steve preferred the speed of a quick smash and dice.  Eventually, when Steve was in a heated discussion about Rachel Ray’s opinions on the importance of a high quality EVOO, Danny had tugged at Steve’s shirt and looked up at him in a way that had Steve forgetting all about olive oil.  Leaning down, Steve forgot all about their guests, as well, thinking only about how much he wanted to kiss Danny, then remembering he _could_ kiss Danny, and doing just that.  Apparently, cupping Danny’s jaw and deepening the kiss was enough to not only end the argument, but also have Kamekona and Flippa saying their goodnights. Steve waved goodbye then wasted no time flopping on the sofa and using Danny’s lap as a pillow.

Danny had smiled down at him, his eyes crinkling in the corners as he set aside his beer to run his hand over Steve’s buzzed hair.  “Hey, you.  You good?”

After the entire evening of watching, and touching, and even kissing Danny, Steve still couldn’t shake the feeling that Danny was going to disappear on him.

“You sticking around?” Steve asked, doing his damnedest not to sound needy or pathetic, but goddamn, it really was pathetic how much he needed Danny

Danny had moved his hand to grip Steve’s hip, slid two fingers in a belt loop, and rubbed his thumb along a patch of skin just above Steve’s hipbone.  “You just try getting rid of me.”

The thing was, he hadn’t tried getting rid of Danny earlier that day, but he almost lost him anyway. Steve had closed his eyes, turned to his side, and tilted his head just enough so that he could press his forehead into the super soft t-shirt Danny was wearing.

“Babe?” Danny’s voice was worried, and his thumb stopped moving. Steve hated that more than the concern he heard.

“Just been a weird day. Kind of a roller coaster, you know?” Steve let his hand drift under that same comfy shirt to rest against the warm skin of Danny’s abs, felt a mirroring heat from Danny’s thumb pressed against his skin.  Even after all the extremes of the day, if he could stay like this, just like this, he’d be good for the rest of his life.

Danny’s thumb started its circular movement again, and Steve wanted to melt to this spot.  “And that’s different from every other day how?”  Danny asked.  “Oh, right, I remember now- today we get to have sex as soon as these yahoos get out of here.” Danny bent his wrist, just enough that his thumb was tracing the outline of Steve’s pelvis as it dipped below the waistband of his jeans.

Steve’s eyes flew open; all thoughts of lounging with Danny on the lanai for eternity vanished as he sat up. “Out. Everybody out.” 

Danny had busted out laughing.

So maybe Steve was a little obsessed with that spot and what Danny could do with it, as well. Then again, Steve was a little obsessed with Danny in general.

Eyeing the phone that had skidded about a foot away as he had worked on his leg, Steve’s hand actually twitched wanting to pick it up and call to make sure Danny and the kids were okay. Although, if they weren’t, what the hell could Steve do about it locked in a basement? If they were safe, Steve could be endangering them just for his own peace of mind. He wouldn’t put himself before Danny, not the way Matt had done… and fuck, that was today.  Steve may have forgotten about what today was, but Danny wouldn’t, and Steve ending up taken would just drive that home even more.  Forget losing his mind, Danny was probably losing his goddamn shit right now.    

That thought was enough to have Steve picking up the phone and hitting the speed dial button.  It went immediately to voice mail, which didn’t help Steve’s level of worry any.  He dialed again, and it did the same thing.  It could just be that Danny didn’t recognize the number and wasn’t answering, or it could mean they had Danny and had taken his phone the same way they had Steve’s.  The first, it had to be the first one. Danny was fine.  He had to be. He fucking had to be.

Then why did Steve feel like he had a rock in the pit of his stomach?

In a final desperate move, Steve tried his best to spell out the code words using the key pad.  He could barely see the numbers much less the letters on each, and the sweat dripping in his eyes wasn’t helping.  He hadn’t realized how hot and stuffy the room was until just now, which made him wonder if he should be worried about his oxygen supply.  Later, he’d worry about that later, after he talked to Danny.  Steve managed to finish the text, then called Danny once more.  This time, he was rewarded with Danny’s voice.  He honestly didn’t hear the words Danny said, but he heard the relief there that mirrored his own as he huffed out Danny’s name.

Steve cut Danny off before he could change the subject. “Grace?”

“She’s fine,” Danny assured him, and Steve slumped in relief to hear it. “Worried about you, but fine.”

“Thank God,” Steve said, leaning his head back against the concrete wall and feeling a little light headed.  “What about you and Charlie?”

“He’s fine, too. We both are.  He stopped puking once the drugs took effect,” Danny told him.  “But could you, please, for one minute stop worrying about everyone else, and tell me where the hell you are?”

“Don’t know,” Steve admitted, realizing for the first time he hadn’t really tried to figure out _where_ he was, seeing as he’d been so worried about Danny and the kids. “Woke up here, found this phone, called you.”

Steve could hear Lou saying something in the background, but couldn’t make it out, then the older man’s voice came in clearer.  “Alright, Steve, just hold tight.  We’re going to trace the call and find you. Okay?”

“I can get behind that plan.”  Steve honest to God loved the hell out of his team.  They’d trace this damn phone, find him, he’d be back with Danny soon…it was almost too good to be true.  “Danno, you’re telling me the truth about Gracie, right?  I mean, there were bullets flying, and she was trying to back out… she really didn’t get hurt?”

“I swear to you, she’s fine,” Danny promised.  “Or she will be when we get you home.  Can’t say the same for my car.”

Of course, Danny would bring that up now.  Steve gave a weak snort.  “Sorry about that.”

“Yeah? Well, not as sorry as you’re going to be about your truck.”

And this?  This was exactly what Steve needed right now, to argue with Danny about their cars if they couldn’t be in one together.

Although he could have done without dog vomit in his truck. “Jesus, that smell will never come out.”

Steve shifted and pain shot through his leg and he couldn’t hold back a groan.  Looking down, Steve saw that the bleeding really hadn’t slowed much. Damn.   He was going to have to figure out a better tourniquet.

“How are the GSWs?” Danny asked in obvious worry.

So, Danny knew about that. Steve considered lying.  Danny would be worried enough as it was, no need to make it worse.

Danny, however, was reading his mind.  “Steven, I am literally, at this very moment, standing over a puddle of your blood, so do not even think of lying to me.”

“One on my hip, it’s just a deep graze,” Steve admitted.  “Bleeding’s slowed on it.  But my leg…that one’s giving me a little more trouble.”

“Commander, have you tried a tourniquet?” Junior asked.

Steve had kind of hoped Junior wouldn’t go there.  He could hear how Danny was barely holding it together as it was.  Finally, he decided he’d just have to tell the truth.  “The one I’m using isn’t exactly cutting it.” And maybe stretch the truth a little, as well.  “Don’t worry; I’ve got some other ideas.”

Danny, as usual, went straight to smartass mode.  “Sure, nothing to worry about.  Sound like you’ve got this all under control so maybe we’ll just kick back with a few beers and see you when you get back.”

Steve knew the only way to counter Danny’s building panic would be to sound as confident in his own abilities as possible.  “Danny, this is not my first rodeo, you know that. When you figure out where I am, I’ll be waiting for you when you get here. Okay?”

“Just hold on, babe. As soon as Jerry gets a location, we’ll be there.” Danny promised, but Steve could hear the despair in his voice.

Jesus, Steve wanted this to be over, because he sure the hell didn’t want to die, especially not with everything and everyone he had to live for, but mainly so he could see Danny again and hear him bitching at him in relief. He hadn’t been able to stand Danny sounding like he had no chance in hell of being happy when he’d fought Rachel for custody for all those years.  It would cut straight through Steve every time Danny got off the phone with a lawyer and looked like he’d received a death sentence at the thought of losing even an hour with Grace.  It was honest to God breaking his heart to hear a similar tone from Danny now.

Tani’s voice came across the phone.  “Jerry says he can’t trace it.  It’s not calling over a cell tower.  He thinks it’s probably over a computer connection somehow.”

“Well, that kind of sucks.” Yeah, he was definitely going to need that tourniquet.

“Commander, turn off the Wi-Fi on the phone,” Junior suggested.  “Maybe that will push it to work off a cell tower.”

Steve barely knew how to do that on his smart phone, and that had a user-friendly home screen.  “It’s just a little flip phone,” Steve told them.  “Haven’t seen one like this in years.”    He held it out to try to see it better, bring it into focus, which was getting more and more difficult to do. “Do you know how hard it was to text using just the number keys?”  He didn’t see anything about the Wi-Fi, but he noticed something else.   “Hey, Danny? It looks like I’m on the last of the battery on this thing.”

Steve could hear Junior and Danny talking about texts, but all Steve could think about was this damn phone was going to go dead, and he wouldn’t be able to talk to Danny anymore.  Fuck that shouldn’t be as terrifying as multiple bullet wounds while locked in a basement, but it was, it really fucking was.  Maybe that’s exactly why they’d left the phone for him.  Just enough time to prove he was alive, but not enough time for much else.

Steve came back to the conversation when Lou said something about, “Anything you can see or hear.”

Steve studied the room for the first time.  “I’m in a basement room, I can’t really see anything.  Looks like it’s a storage room, maybe.  Concrete walls, some empty shelves, not much else.  Kind of hot in here. There’s a window high up I can’t reach.  Too small to climb out of anyway.” He realized for the first time that the windows were providing the only light in the room.

“Okay, what about sounds,” Lou coaxed.  “Do you hear anything?”

“All I can hear is the rain.”

“Rain?” Danny sounded like he thought Steve was nuts.  It was a tone Steve knew all too well.

“Yeah, the rain,” Steve insisted.  “It just started up a minute ago.”

“Babe, there’s no rain.” Danny was just as adamant.  “Hasn’t been any since last night.”

“Danny, I can see it hitting the window.  It’s definitely raining where I am.”

Steve could hear the conversation running in the background as they checked the weather.  His heart sank to hear the only rain was on the Big Island.  That was an hour away and a whole lot of island to search with no leads, and while Eric might get lucky and find the flight that he’d been on, the flight he had absolutely no memory of, it was definitely a long shot.

The only thing that might help would be to identify who had taken him.  “One of the guys who attacked us, he looked familiar.” Steve tried yet again to recall the man, but with no luck.  “I just can’t remember where I’ve seen him before.”

“The guy you shot, Carlos Torres, ring any bells?” Lou asked.

“No, I don’t… shit, the phone is beeping,” Steve couldn’t keep the anxiety from his voice.  “The battery…I’m going to lose you soon.”  And to hell with the discussion of how they were going to find him, he couldn’t even help them anyway.  There was only one thing Steve cared about right then.  “Danny?”

“Listen, we’re going to find you,” Danny promised, sounding as desperate as Steve felt.

Steve knew that optimism was a hard sell for Danny, which just made Steve love him a little more.  Swallowing down his emotions, Steve kept his voice as level and positive as he could, so he could say what he needed to say without freaking Danny the hell out.  “Hey, you give Grace and Charlie a hug for me. Alright?  I love you guys.”  The phone gave one final beep before he even finished.  “Danny?”  There was no answer; the phone was dead.

Steve was tempted to throw the phone against the far wall.  Instead, he simply dropped it. He honestly wasn’t sure if he felt better after that phone call or worse, which was probably why the bastards had left the phone for him in the first place. Steve refused to let them win.  His team would find him.  _Danny_ would find him, so he needed to make sure he was alive for that.

Shrugging out of his button down he wore over his t-shirt, Steve tied the sleeve tightly around his leg.  Then he took his watch off, looped it around the fabric of the sleeve and refastened the band. That done, he started twisting the watch, which twisted the fabric in return, and he didn’t stop until it ate painfully into his leg.  Steve focused on breathing, closing his eyes briefly to try to alleviate the spinning sensation.  He needed to secure the tourniquet in case he passed out. Slipping off his tennis shoe, he worked the lace free with one hand, then tied the watch down to his leg on top of his makeshift bandage.  He used the rest of his shirt to press against the seeping wound on his side.  Once he’d completed that task, he slumped down further against the wall, breathing raggedly through the throbbing pain as he stared up at dark light fixtures and a smoke alarm.

Attempting to distract himself, he tried to think of when he might have had a run in with Carlos Torres before today.  Nothing came to mind, but then he had a flash, not of Torres, but of the man who seemed familiar.  He was in the Palace lobby… crap!  He was the guy with the gun!  It hadn’t been an accident; it was deliberately planned.  Chances were it was no coincidence that it was the same time Elena Alejandro had been outside the building.  If she was casing the building or testing security, then they could be planning an attack, and he had no way to let Danny and the others know since all he had was a fucking dead phone with no charger.

He eyed the smoke detector on the ceiling.  If that had a nine-volt battery, he could possibly get enough of a charge on the phone to call Danny and tell him about the probable Alejandro connection.  Only there was nothing to climb on to reach it.  Then he remembered the shoe he’d taken off.

It took him about a dozen throws of the shoe, but the smoke alarm finally crashed to the floor, most of the pieces coming to rest in the middle of the room.  Scooting carefully in an attempt not to loosen the tourniquet, Steve gathered the battery and the little snap on connector, pulling it and the wires free from the plastic casing.  Next, he stripped the wires of their insulation as best he could with teeth and fingernails, and bent them over the positive and negative leads on the phone battery, holding them in place by wrapping the second shoelace around them multiple times. He set his science project carefully aside to give the batteries time to do their thing, then he finally lay back, closed his eyes, and sunk immediately into oblivion.

~H50~H50~H50~H50~H50~

With a flick of his wrist, Jerry moved the image of the attractive woman from the open window on the tech table up to the main screen.  Even though he’d been manning the table for several years now, he still found it pretty damn cool whenever he got to do that. He may not have the smoldering flare of Chin Ho Kelly when the tech table was his baby, but Jerry liked to think he brought his own sort of drama to the information he’d found in his research.

“Look familiar?” he asked the gathered team.

“Elena Alejandro,” Lou said, as if it was obvious.

Danny, however, was squinting at the photo on the screen.  “There’s something different about her, though.  Maybe her nose?”

“It is an Alejandro, just not Elena,” Jerry told them.  “This is Catalina Alejandro, Elena’s mother.  She was an actress in Colombia during the 70s.”

“Let me guess, on a _telanovella_ ,” Tani cut in.

“Yeah,” Jerry relented, a little disappointed that she had ruined his reveal.  “How did you know?”

“Ramos said the woman he met reminded him of a _telenovella_ actress from his childhood,” Junior explained.

“I can see why,” Lou said, “She’s almost a carbon copy of her mom.”

Jerry brought up the promo poster for the show.  “Catalina starred as the fiery daughter of a cattle rancher in _Pasiones Peligrosas._ ”

“Dangerous Passions?” Tani asked with a snort. “Seriously?  Who comes up with these names?”

“Funny you should ask that, Tani.” Jerry loved it when it his team unintentionally set up his next reveal.  “That would be Santiago Reyes, the executive producer of the show.”

“Reyes?” Danny asked, the dread obvious in his voice, as he put together the pieces Jerry already had.

“Father of Marco Reyes.” Jerry tossed a photo of Santiago and a young Marco up on the screen. “And, according to the preliminary DNA results from the hair Eric pulled from the hotel shower drain, most probably the father of Elena Alejandro, as well.”

“Reyes’ sister?” Lou’s eyebrows rose. “Did she move in to take over his operations or something?”

“I don’t think so,” Jerry told them.  “From what I could find, her story of working for the tabloids is true.  I also don’t think she and Marco even knew about each other until they were both adults. Catalina moved to the states soon after Elena was born.  She worked some small time acting gigs in Miami, but nothing as big as she was in Colombia.  I went back through all the CIA info we had on Marco and found these photos taken about ten years ago.” 

The photos were obviously surveillance photos of Marco and Elena leaving a café together, sharing a kiss on the cheek, then going their separate ways.  “There are more photos of them together over the years, always something casual like dinner, some in Colombia, others in Miami.  But there’s no record of Elena in anything before that time. This was also about the time Catalina was killed.”

“Killed how?” Tani asked.

“Burglary gone bad,” Jerry elaborated.  “Catalina walked in and was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat she kept by the door for protection.”  

“Okay, so mom dies, Elena learns who her real father is, maybe from something she finds cleaning out her mom’s stuff,” Danny speculated, “and Elena tracks down Marco to start up a relationship with her brother?”

“That’s what it looks like.  At that point neither had any family still alive,” Jerry told him.  “Elena was an only child, and Marco’s two brothers had been killed as part of the family drug business.”

“And Elena never worked in the cartel?” Junior asked.

“If she did, she stayed off the radar of all the three letter agencies.  She got a nicer house and opened a photo gallery on the side, which Reyes may have funded, but other than that there was nothing.”

“So what?” Danny demanded, his arms waving.  “This is just revenge?  She’s coming after me and my family as revenge for killing a brother she didn’t know she even had until she was in her thirties?”

“Well, there was one other thing,” Jerry told him reluctantly.  “Elena spent a little time in the Dade County Psychiatric Hospital after her mom died.”

With a shake of his head, Danny propped himself against the table.  “To be fair, she denied being a stalker, not a psychopath.”

“She was the one who found her mom,” Jerry explained.  “She kind of had a nervous breakdown as a result.”

“So, apparently, she doesn’t respond well to losing family,” Tani noted dryly.

“Neither do I,” Danny murmured before straightening.  “Okay, so now that we know a little bit more about what sort of crazy we’re up against, how do we use it to find her or Steve.”  When everyone remained silent, Danny sighed.  “That’s what I thought.  So, what else do we know?  What about the IP addresses?  Junior said they were related.”

“They both track back to a VPN…a virtual private network, same for the text you received with Steve’s photo,” Junior explained when Danny looked at him as if he was speaking a foreign language, which to Danny he was.  “When a company uses a VPN, it can have computers anywhere, and when those computers need to communicate with the company network, the data feeds across an encrypted connection.”

“And for us that means?” Danny prompted.

“It means that the IP address we see is for the VPN, not the individual devices,” Junior continued.

“So it’s a dead end,” Danny concluded.

Jerry started typing.  “Not necessarily. The VPN they are using is a commercial provider.  It provides the service to multiple customers, and based on the time and dates of the emails and text, as well as a warrant the Governor herself obtained, the provider has narrowed it down to one customer- Island Property Development.”

“IPD? They’re everywhere,” Lou noted.

Jerry could only nod.  “They own one hundred and twenty-three commercial properties across all the islands.  Everything from business parks and medical complexes to apartment and condos.”

“How many on the Big Island?” Tani asked.

“Forty-one,” Jerry told her.

“And of those, how many within the area with rain this morning?” Danny asked.

“Thirty-two.” Jerry felt as disheartened saying such a large number as Danny looked hearing it.

“Any way to narrow it down?” Danny asked hopefully.

“We’re working on that now,” Jerry promised.  “Trying to cross reference the times with network traffic, but there’s a ton of traffic.  Everything goes across this network, including all the facility automation…building climate controls, spa cycles, irrigation systems, not just email and VOIP calls.  Not to mention that anyone with access and the application can log in from anywhere as long as there is a Wi-Fi connection, even from home or a coffee shop.” 

Danny scrubbed his face in frustration.  “Okay, keep at it.”

Lou squeezed Danny’s shoulder. “I’m going to start working the warrants to search the properties on the Big Island. Make contact with the local PD to be ready to execute the searches as soon as we have them.  If we can narrow them down, great.  If not, we’ll search every last one of them.”

Danny nodded in understanding. “Thanks, Lou. And Jerry… all of you. I… just thanks.”

“We got this for now,” Lou promised. “Why don’t you go check on Grace and Charlie for a few minutes?”            

Danny seemed reluctant to go, but with a glance over to his office where Rachel and the kids were waiting, he finally nodded in agreement.

Junior and Tani retreated to Tani’s office to go over the photos they’d recovered from Alejandro’s hotel room, to see if maybe they could find some clues there.  Jerry kept at the data search on the VPN, but it was kind of like looking for patterns in a plate of spaghetti.  Still that was his thing, finding what others overlooked, finding the needle by identifying the one piece of hay that didn’t look exactly like all the others.

Danny’s visit with his family didn’t last long. He was back out of his office in less than fifteen minutes after apparently having a realization, “You said you can see climate control records?  Because Steve mentioned it was hot in the room where he was being held.  Maybe the a/c went down. Can you see that?”

Jerry nodded in understanding.  “There should be either an alarm that something went down, or it’s in maintenance mode in the system.”  He was already pulling up data on the thirty-two buildings on the Big Island.

With a snap of his fingers, Danny added, “She had a photo of a moving van.  I remember seeing it in the negatives we looked at. If someone vacated a building, they may have turned the temperature back to save on power costs.”

“I’ll contact IPD,” Lou volunteered, “have them send over any information about any recent lease changes.”

Jerry scrolled quickly through the records and saw two possibilities in their subset of buildings that were recording elevated temperatures. He quickly ran the addresses.  “I’ve got an office complex, primarily law offices, and another complex that houses mainly doctor’s offices, both in Hilo.”

“Alright, we finally have something,” Danny declared, a note of hope in his voice for the first time all day. He was already walking toward his office as he ordered, “Lou, contact Hilo PD and get them searching these buildings, like yesterday.  Jerry, talk to HPD, get us some transport, and we’ll meet the search teams there, hopefully, after they’ve found Steve.”

Jerry hadn’t even finished dialing before Tani and Junior walked out of her office, looking anything but happy.

“What’s up?” Jerry asked in dread.

Tani gave him a look that said, ‘nothing good,’ then went straight to Danny’s office.  She opened the door, hesitating when she saw Rachel and the kids, as if she’d forgotten they were there.  “Hey, boss, can we talk?”

Danny came out, a frown of worry on his face.  “We have a lead on Steve in Hilo,” Danny told them to bring them up to speed.  “We’ll be heading out here in a few minutes.”

“Sir, that may not be such a good idea,” Junior warned.  “At least not until we get your family somewhere safe.”

“Christ, what now?” Danny demanded.

Tani leaned back against the tech table.  “We went through the negatives we recovered from Alejandro and found the ones Ramos was so worried about.  Ends up he was sleeping with Lin Mae Parks, the wife of a mid-level drug dealer, Ryan Parks.  Ramos has reason to be worried about Parks finding out about the affair, he’s done time for assault and battery.  Put a guy in a coma for talking to his girlfriend at the time at a party.  A week after he got out, the girlfriend was dead, but they could never find anything to pin it on Parks.”

“Okay,” Danny conceded, “Ramos is screwing the wrong woman, but Parks supposedly doesn’t know anything about this, or the blackmail does no good.”

“It’s not Parks who’s the problem,” Junior clarified.  “It’s his wife’s father, Bai Zhun, we need to be worried about.”

Danny rubbed at his forehead.  “You mean Bai Zhun the Triad enforcer?  That Bai Zhun?”

“There were photos of the daughter meeting with her dad, as well,” Tani continued. “If Lin Mae went to daddy for help to keep things quiet from Parks, we could have a Triad Red Pole involved in all this.”

“Yeah, but why wouldn’t Bai Zhun just kill Parks if he thought he was a threat to his daughter?” Jerry asked.

“Bai Zhun’s son was executed in the round up of criminals Steve headed up,” Junior explained.

“Given the opportunity to hurt Steve, he’d probably take it,” Danny admitted. “Ramos might not have anything personal against Five-0, but Bai Zhun does.”

Jerry could see the conflicting emotions play across Danny’s face—stay here with his kids who might be in danger from Bai Zhun, or go to the Big Island and find Steve.

Danny mumbled something that sounded like, “You said it yourself, they’re always top of the list,” then he took a deep breath.  “Lou, you and Tani head to the Big Island.  Bring him home.”  It was a plea as much as an order.

“If he’s there, we’ll find him,” Lou promised before hitching his head for Tani to follow him.

Before they had even made it across the room, Jerry was calling, “Hey, guys, we just got a hit on Elena Alejandro’s cell phone.”  Jerry pulled up the map showing a red blinking dot at the Aloha Tower’s shopping center about the time Junior pulled a phone from his pocket.

“She just responded to Ramos’ email,” Junior informed them.  “She says she’s willing to meet.”

Lou was already shaking his head.  “Danny, Hilo PD can handle the search.  If he’s in either of those buildings, he’ll be in the hospital by the time we get there.”

“I know, I know,” Danny waved a hand.  “Get SWAT backup and bring Alejandro in.  She’s not getting away from us again.”

Junior hung back and told Danny.  “I’d like to stay here.  In case we need to get your family out of the building.”

Jerry understood what Junior wasn’t saying; bringing in Elena could be the signal to take down the Palace.

Danny nodded once before saying, “Thanks, Junior, and we are getting them out of the building.  Jerry, when’s the next flight out to London? I think Rachel and the kids should go visit her parents for a few days.”

Jerry quickly pulled up the flight information.  “There’s a flight to Heathrow that leaves in three hours.”

Danny pulled his phone from his pocket and hit a pre-dial.  “Harry, it’s Danny Williams.”  He put the phone on the tech table and it connected so that they could all hear the call.

“Danny!” the British voice responded cheerfully, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Jerry had always had a bit of hero worship for the Five-0 task force.  They did cool shit on a daily basis, and let’s be honest, they looked good doing it, which was why he had wanted to be a part of it ever since Chin Ho Kelly had waltzed back into Jerry’s life and asked for help on a case all those years ago.  Now Jerry got to do cool shit every day, too.  Still, none of them could hold a candle to a real, honest to God, 007 like Harry Langford.

“I need to ask a favor,” Danny told him.

“It doesn’t sound like you’re ringing me up to ask for help planning a stag party for you and Steve,” Harry said, catching onto Danny’s tone.

Danny’s lips curled into a slightly wistful smirk.  “I don’t think you need us as an excuse for your debauchery, Harry.  Besides, I need to get Steve back first before we start planning anything in the future.”

“What’s happened?” Harry asked, all joking aside.

“I fucked up a few years ago, and now someone’s after my family.  They took Steve, but they want my kid’s, too.  I’m putting them on a flight to London in a few hours with their mother.  You in town?”

“I can be by the time they arrive,” Harry promised. “Send me the flight details, and I’ll be waiting at the gate.”

“I owe you one,” Danny offered, before admitting.  “You should know, the person behind this may have pulled in the Triad to help.”

“The Triad?” Harry snorted on the other end of the line. “That’s what I love about you blokes; you never do anything small.  What about Steve? Anything I can do on that front?”

“We’re working a lead now,” Danny told him.  “But I’ll let you know if anything changes and you can help.”

“You hang in there, mate, and concentrate on finding Steve.  I’ll take care of Grace and Charlie.”

“Thanks, Harry.”   Danny’s phone beeped to indicate a new call was coming in, and his eyes widened in surprise.  “I need to take this call, Harry.  I’ll be in touch soon.” Danny disconnected from Harry to answer the other line.  “Steve?” he asked hopefully.

“Hey, Danny,” Steve said, sounding a little winded as he blurted out.  “I couldn’t get more than a few minutes of charge, so we don’t have a lot of time with this call.”

Jerry felt as relieved as Danny looked to hear the Commander’s voice. After that photo Danny had received, they were all running on more hope than conviction that it really had been taken before Steve’s first call.

“Wait, you have a phone charger?”  Danny demanded.

“I made one,” Steve said simply, like it was no big deal.

Danny gave an aggrieved shake of his head.  “Of course you did.”

“Listen, the phones going to start beeping any second.  The guy I saw at the drug store, he was the one in the lobby yesterday.”

“Yeah, with the gun in his bag,” Danny informed him.  “He works for Ernesto Ramos.  Ends up we weren’t the only ones Elena Alejandro was photographing in compromising situations, only she’s using them to get at us.”

“So you know she’s involved. Good.” Steve sounded relieved they had made the connection.  “Any reason why she’s behind this?”

Danny braced himself on the tech table and hung his head.  “She’s Marco Reyes’ sister, and now she may have brought Bai Zhun into the mix.”

“The Triad is nothing to fuck around with,” Steve warned.

“You think I don’t know that?” Danny retorted.  “It’s why I’m sending Rachel and the kids to London.  Harry’s going to meet them at the airport.”

“Yeah, okay, that’s a good idea,” Steve agreed.  “Harry will keep them safe.”

“And we have a lead on your location,” Danny told him.  “Hilo PD should be there soon, if we’re right.  And if not, Lou and Tani are bringing in Alejandro any minute now.  One way or another, I’m going to find you, and soon.”

Jerry could hear the desperation, but more, the guilt in Danny’s voice.

Apparently, Steve did, too.  “Danny, this isn’t your fault. Do you hear me?”

Danny ignored the reassurance and asked instead, “How’s the leg?”

Steve, however, wasn’t going to let it go.  “Danny, I’m serious.  This is not your fault.” Steve took a deep breath, as if bracing himself to say something he didn’t want to say.  “I love you.  And if for some reason you don’t find—“

“Don’t,” Danny snapped.  “Don’t you fucking dare say goodbye to me. I’m going to find you.  Get that through your idiot skull.  I’m going to find you.”

“I know you will, buddy.”  Although by Steve’s tone, it sounded like he wasn’t sure his team would find him in time.

“Steven, I swear to God, I am going to kick your ass when I do find you for doubting me.  Besides, there is no reason to say goodbye.  You love me, I love you.  You know that as well as I do.  So no need to say it again.  All of our wills and insurance bullshit have been in the same fucking safe in your office for years.  We’ve been over them; we both know what to do.  And you know I’ll make sure Mary and Joannie have everything they’ll need.  If she wants to move back to this Godforsaken rock, I’ll help her with the house, if she wants to sell it—“

“Mary doesn’t get the house,” Steve cut in.

“What?”  Danny demanded, sounding more annoyed that Steve interrupted his rant than anything.

“I changed it, I changed my will, and Mary’s cool with it.  You get the house,” Steve told him simply.  “You and the kids.”

Danny snatched the phone up off the table, but as usual, he forgot to take it off speaker, leaving it connected, so that Jerry and Junior could still hear him as he stormed into Steve’s office for some nonexistent privacy.  “You son of a bitch, I don’t want to live in your fucking house without you.”

Junior looked to Jerry as they heard Steve saying, “I just want you and Grace and Charlie taken care of.”

“We should disconnect the speaker,” Junior said, but didn’t move to kill the feed.

“Yeah, we should,” Jerry agreed, as he stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts and looked anywhere but at the table.

“Listen to me, you moron, because I’m not going to say this again--I am not living in that house without you, ” Danny insisted once more, before conceding, “but I will live in it with you.”

Jerry and Junior both shared a surprised yet guilty expression that they were hearing this.

Steve seemed just as shocked as they were, although infinitely more pleased.  “Really? You’ll really move in? You’re not just trying to bribe me to stay alive?”

“Yes, really. And it’s not a bribe, it’s motivation,” Danny countered.

“Yeah, Jersey style motivation,” Steve snorted.  “Making me an offer I can’t refuse.”

Jerry grimaced.  Was that supposed to be Brando?

Danny, from the sound of it, wasn’t very impressed either.  “Oh, fuck you, and your for shit stereotype impersonations.”

Steve actually laughed.  “You don’t need to motivate me to stay alive for you, Danno.  You know that.”

“Yeah, I know,” Danny admitted quietly.  “And you don’t need me to say I love you, babe, because you know that, too.”

“Damn straight, I know it,” Steve assured.   “Shit, the phone is beeping again.  I need to recharge—“

The call disconnected, but they could see Danny in Steve’s office still talking, as if he was trying to reconnect by sheer will power alone, before dropping the phone and the hand that held it to his side. He sat on the edge of Steve’s desk, like Jerry had seen him do a millions time before to discuss the latest information on a case, or to discuss lunch options, or to discuss some personal issue one or the other needed advice on.  Over the past several months, Jerry had watched Danny lean in on more than one of those regular visits with a wry smile and murmur something that had Steve’s face lighting up with what Jerry could only described as pure, unadulterated adoration.  Only this time, Steve wasn’t in his typical seat smiling or rolling his eyes or bitching right back at his partner.

Jerry had to admit, it was kind of weird seeing Steve and Danny as Steve _and_ Danny.  That was a conjunction junction whose function he never thought he’d apply to those two, at least not like that. He’d actually said those exact words to Chin during a Facetime chat they’d had several months ago.

Chin had just laughed.  “I don’t know why anyone is surprised.  I’m more surprised it took them this long to realize they already were a couple.”

“Seriously?” Jerry had asked.  “I mean they’re obviously close, but Steve treats everyone like family, it’s just the way he is.”

“True, but do you remember several years back when Danny and I were both arrested for the roles we played in Reyes’ death?”  Chin asked.  “I got picked up by AI, and Danny was extradited to Colombia?”

“Kind of hard to forget that,” Jerry admitted.

“Steve had a choice to make; put Five-0 resources into getting me out or getting Danny out,” Chin explained.  “He chose Danny.”

There was no blame, no bitterness in Chin’s statement, but Jerry felt he should defend the choice.  “Yeah, but Steve at least knew you would be physically safe for the time being.  Danny’s life was on the line.”

“Hey, Steve made the right choice, and if he’d had a chance to ask me, I would have told him to go after Danny.  But you know, I couldn’t help but think back to when I had to make a choice like that, a choice between Malia and Kono.”

Jerry could see the pain of that memory on Chin’s face even through his computer screen.  Even though he was happy with Abbey and their life with Sara in San Francisco, Chin would always mourn the loss of Malia.

“As much as I loved both of them,” Chin continued, “there was really only one choice. Malia.  Whether he realized it or not at the time, there was only one real choice for Steve back then and that was Danny.  I’m just glad they’re finally taking advantage of their second chance that I didn’t get with Malia.”

Now, watching Danny as he sat alone in Steve’s office with head hung in defeat, Jerry hoped they’d get yet another chance to have a life together.

Danny sat there like that for a few seconds before finally straightening and coming back into the common area.

Jerry and Junior tried their best to look innocent and busy and not as if they’d just listened in on a very private conversation between their bosses.

“I’m going to go break the news to Rachel that she’s going on an eighteen hour flight with a sick kid,” Danny told them.  “My only hope is that Harry can charm her once they get there.  Let me know when you hear from Lou and Tani.”

“Sure thing, bossman,” Jerry promised.                

From the looks of it, when Danny and Rachel stepped out of his office to finish their conversation about her upcoming trip, Harry was going to have his charm factor tested to the max.

Rachel looked back to make sure the door to Danny’s office had closed so that Grace and Charlie couldn’t hear them.  “Daniel, you cannot simply walk into a room and order me to leave the country.”

“You do not understand what we are up against here,” Danny tried to reason.  “These people are killers and this woman is insane.”

“So you’re sending your children off to some unknown man—"

“Harry is MI-6! He’s got all the British government’s resources at this beck and call.” Danny’s hands were flying, as if he could conjure up a justification that his ex-wife would listen to out of thin air.   “He’s one of the safest people I can have looking out for you guys.”

Rachel crossed her arms. “We don’t have any bags packed.  Not to mention all the passports are at my house.”

“I will get the passports myself and throw some clothes in a couple of bags.”  Danny scrubbed at his face.  “I’m not leaving Grace and Charlie until I know they are headed somewhere safe, but I can’t go after Steve without…”  Danny exhaled heavily, steepling his hands in front of his chest. “Please, Rachel, I’m begging you. This is tearing me up inside.  I need to know you and the kids are safe, and I _really_ need to find Steve.”

‘’Alright, Daniel, we’ll go,” Rachel finally relented, reaching out to rub Danny’s arm sympathetically.

Before Danny could tell Rachel thank you, Jerry’s phone range.  “It’s Lou.” Answering the phone through the table, Jerry asked, “Lou, what’s your status?”

“We have Alejandro,” Lou informed him.  “We’re bringing her in now.”

“Good work,” Danny told him as he, Jerry, and Junior shared a moment of triumph that they were one step closer to putting this all behind them.

“Who is Alejandro?” Rachel asked.

“The one who did this,” Danny practically growled.  “And the one who’s going to tell me where the hell to find Steve.”

Given Danny’s expression, Jerry was pretty sure she’d be the one to pay if they didn’t find Steve in time, especially after Hilo PD had called to say they’d searched the entire basement of both buildings and hadn’t found any sign of Steve.


	4. Chapter 4

Lou Grover knew a thing or two about being lost, about being emotionally adrift and looking for any sign of rescue.   Lou thanked the good Lord above every day that He had led him to Renee, that she had agreed to put up with a grumpy cop for all these years, and blessed him with two children who were like their mother, just as beautiful inside as they were out.  Renee had stood by him when he needed support to stand, and pulled him to his feet when he didn’t have the strength to stand at all.  She had rescued him a thousand times over with nothing more than a smile, and she never even knew it.  It went a long way in explaining why Lou could understand Steve and Danny falling in love the way they had.  They’d found each other when they both needed someone most.  Both of them had left behind everything they knew to honor a commitment, for Danny it was a father’s love, for Steve it was a son’s duty.  They’d both been lost, both needed something or someone to act as the rock to steady and support them, and while they both thought they’d found it in the task force, they’d really found it in each other.  Lou firmly believed God had brought those two together, and if they fought like two toddlers who’d missed their naptimes?  Well, that just went to prove what Lou had always known…God had one hell of a sense of humor.

Not only could Lou understand the devotion Steve and Danny had to each other, he understood what it was to have someone he loved kidnapped, and he understood having his family hunted for his own mistakes.  So, he understood when Danny walked into the interrogation room, pulled his gun without saying a word, and shot Elena Alejandro in the leg. 

He could understand it, but he couldn’t let it pass.

“What the ever living hell?” Lou exclaimed, grabbing Danny and pulling him away from the woman who was now bleeding from her thigh.  He had known letting Danny in the interrogation room would be a bad idea.  He also knew there was no way on God’s green Earth he’d keep him out.  Pushing the man against the far wall, Lou demanded, “Give me that damn gun!”

Lou had seen Danny angry before, dangerously so, but he’d never seen the wild expression that was in Danny’s eyes at that moment.  “They didn’t find him,” Danny told Lou between clinched teeth.  “He wasn’t in either of the buildings.  So, he’s out there, somewhere, alone, bleeding in a fucking concrete room because of her.  It’s only fair that she does the same.”

“He’s bleeding because of you,” Elena accused, sucking in ragged breaths as blood flowed down her leg.  Still, you’d never even know she was in pain given the absolute bat shit crazy smile on her face. “He’s going to die, because of you.”

Lou kept himself between Danny and the woman, pressing hard against Danny’s chest to keep him in place, feeling Danny’s heart pounding madly beneath his palm. 

Tani burst into the room, her own gun out in response to the gunshot she had heard. She looked first at the bleeding Alejandro, then at where Lou held Danny in place, her eyes drifting to the gun in Danny’s hand.

Lou gave the younger woman an almost imperceptible shake of his head to try to tell her things were barely contained at the moment, so don’t say anything to rile Danny up more than he was.

“Tani, get the first aid kit,” Lou ordered.

She lowered her own service weapon and nodded hesitantly. “Sure thing. I’ll be right back.”

When Tani left, Lou turned his attention to Elena.

“You can stop this,” Lou told her, turning as best he could to talk to her without letting up his hold on his teammate.  “You can tell us where you have Steve and stop it.  Right now you’re facing kidnapping, you can probably plea out of the attempted murder charge, but if he dies?  If you kill a cop?   Well, let’s just say you’re lucky Hawaii doesn’t have a death penalty. But you’ll be facing life, and I’ll personally do everything in my power to make sure that life is a living hell. Tiny room, no windows, maybe an hour of fresh air and sunshine a day. Maybe.”

She snorted.  “And what kind of life will he have when I take everything he loves away from him?”

Lou pushed back on Danny, who tried to move off the wall.

“Lock me up, I don’t care,” Elena continued.  “It will be worth it knowing he has nothing, that he has paid for what he did to me.”

“What _I_ did?” Danny demanded.

“You took my brother!” she screamed.

“He took mine!” Danny yelled back, elbowing Lou in the ribs, just hard enough that he could slip past him and press his gun against her head.  “You lost your brother?  You’re going to lose your life.”

Alejandro smiled at him and spoke in little more than a whisper, the way would if she was telling him a secret.  “So are you, one person at a time.”

Lou thought that was it, he was going to watch Danny execute Elena Alejandro, just as Steve had watched him do the same to Marcos Reyes, and not be able to do a damn thing about it.  Danny, however, didn’t squeeze the trigger, he didn’t take his finger off of it, but he didn’t squeeze it either.  Lou would take that as a win, for now.

“Danny, come on now, just lower the gun,” Lou tried to coax.  “She isn’t worth it.”  

“Yeah, but Steve is,” Danny countered.

“Yes, he is,” Lou agreed.  “But this isn’t helping us find him, and it won’t make you feel any better.  You’ve been here before, man; you know I’m telling you the truth.  It won’t make you feel any better.  You know that.”

Danny, whether he actually heard Lou or not, didn’t acknowledge him. “Marcos Reyes beat my brother to death then stuffed him in an oil drum.  The body was in such bad shape I wouldn’t let my mother see it; she couldn’t even see her son one last time to say goodbye. My father was a firefighter, saw more than his fair share of burned and mangled bodies over the years, he insisted on seeing Matt’s body and ran from the room when he did.  The thing is, I doubt Reyes even did it himself.  He probably ordered it done; never even looked Matt in the eyes, because he wasn’t worth the time.  All he wanted was his money, and he’d lie and kill to get it.  But I am looking you in the eyes, so I can tell you the truth about the man you’re willing to kill over.  A man like the one who killed your own mother.”

“My mother lied to me for over thirty years,” Elena snarled.  “She told me my father was a nobody, ran off before I was even born, that I was better off without him when she knew I had brothers out there.   When I found the birth certificate, my real birth certificate, found out who my father was, she forbid me from making contact with my family.  Said he was nothing but drug running trash who had died and good riddance.  Said his sons were no better than their father.  Said she had left Colombia to get away from Santiago Reyes to give me a better life.”  Alejandro barked a bitter laugh.  “A better life?  I spent that life alone with her and her shitty jobs performing in clubs, doing local car commercials, barely keeping a roof over our heads. She said I was trash, too, if I wanted to find them.  I had family, and she kept me from them.  She was the trash, not me, not my brother, her.  I did what was right, what needed to be done.  I got rid of her so that I could have family, real family.  And you took him away from me, so you have to pay, just like she did.”

Lou could only murmur, “Holy hell,” to realize she had just confessed to killing her own mother.

Danny actually took a step back in shock, although his gun remained raised. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“He was supposed to call me back,” Elena said.

Lou didn’t know if that was her explanation to Danny’s rhetorical question or not.

“We were talking on the phone, he said he had business to take care of, that it wouldn’t take long, and he would call me back. A few minutes later you killed him.” She sneered at Danny. “I didn’t get a chance to even say goodbye, really say goodbye. Tell me, are you truly happy you didn’t say goodbye when you had the chance?”

Danny blinked at the question.  “How…?”  The gun dropped to his side, and Danny visibly paled.

Alejandro's smile just grew.

“Danny?” Tani called, the first aid kit in her hands. 

Lou hadn’t even realizing their younger teammate had returned to the room until she spoke, but he didn’t understand any more than she did what had hit Danny so hard.

Danny immediately turned on his heels, signaling for the other two to follow him out of the room.  Once outside, he took the first aid kit from Tani and handed it to Lou.  “Listen to me, Tani, I need you and Junior to take Rachel and the kids to the airport, right now.  Do it quietly, out the back door where Ramos’ men are watching.  In fact, take their car.”

“Their car? Why--?” Tani started to demand, but Danny just talked a little louder and over her.

“Get it as close to the building as possible so anyone else watching can’t see you.  Once you’re at the airport, take them to a secure holding room and wait for a call from Lou with the new flight information.”

“ _New_ flight information?” Lou’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Danny, what the hell is going on?”

Danny pointed back into the interrogation room.  “She knows about the conversation I had with Steve the last time he called. Things we talked about.  So she has to know I’m planning to send them to London on the next flight.” 

“She must have had a tap on the phone Steve was using,” Lou pointed out.

Danny’s head shook in frustration.  “Of course she did.”

Lou didn’t know the details of the call Steve had made while he and Tani were bringing in Alejandro, but Jerry had given them a heads up that it had been plenty emotional for both Steve and Danny.  The guilty expression on both Junior and Jerry’s face when he told that to Lou said they’d probably heard some very personal things between the two men.  From Danny’s reaction, Jerry and Junior hadn’t been the only ones listening in.

“We have to assume your phone is compromised, too,” Tani pointed out.  “She could have sent some sort of spyware attached to the photo of Steve.” 

“Which is why Lou or Jerry will be finding a flight and letting you know what it is.”  Danny placed a hand to his forehead as another thought dawned on him.  “Jesus, she knew we were closing in on his location.   She could have had him moved before the Hilo PD even arrived at the building.”

Lou could hear the guilt, but mainly the despair, that realization brought.

“Danny, man—,“ Lou started in an attempt to comfort his friend, but honestly, if she’d moved Steve, the chances of them finding him were dwindling fast, seeing as what few clues they had were now gone.

Danny however waved him off and waved Tani toward the stairs.  “Why are you still here?  Go.  I’ll meet you at the airport as soon as I have the passports from Rachel’s.”

Tani broke into a jog down the hallway.

“I’ll go with you,” Lou offered.

“No, you stay and go over those photos one more time.  See if there’s anything, _anything_ , that could be a clue as to where she’s holding Steve.”

“If it’s there, I’ll find it,” Lou promised.  Tani and Junior had already been through them, but a new set of eyes never hurt.  Besides, as fast as the noobies had come along, they still didn’t have the experience to catch details all the years on the force had given Lou.  “What about our guest in there?”

“Get her to a hospital, make sure she stays there.  She’s not going to get off easy by bleeding out.  If I’m going to live a long miserable life alone, so is she.” 

Lou gripped Danny’s shoulder.  “Look, no matter what happens you are not going to be alone.” 

He’d said something similar to Steve about six months before, when they’d all given up hope that Danny was still alive.  He’d meant it then and he meant it now.  In the end, Danny had been fine, probably better than Steve was at the end of the ordeal, and Steve hadn’t been in an exploding building.  Lou had watched as Steve kept a greedy eye on Danny all that night and for weeks after.  Hell, Steve still looked at Danny that way from time to time when he thought no one was watching him.  Lou had a feeling Danny would be looking at Steve that same way for a long time to come when they found him…and it would be when, not if.   Lou wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

Danny shook his head.  “Just…please…find something we can use. I’ll be back just as soon as Rachel and the kids are at the airport.”

By the time Lou got Elena transferred to Queen’s Medical, everyone else was on the way to the airport. Even Eddie had gone along with Danny on the ride to Rachel’s, so that only Jerry and Lou remained in HQ.  Lou glanced at Steve’s empty office as he made his way into Tani’s, where she and Junior had spread the photos across every flat surface in the room. 

Even as he studied the photos, Lou couldn’t keep his thoughts from drifting to Steve’s first day back to work after his mission to rescue Joe White.  Lou had walked into his office to see Danny sitting on the corner of Steve’s desk, the same stance in which he’d seen those two more times than he could count. Only this time, Steve’s hand rested on Danny’s leg, and the two were smiling at each other, as if they were sharing a secret, or maybe remembering something from the couple of days off they’d taken together.  Lou could practically see the canary feathers in their mouths.  Lou remembered what it was like during those early days with Renee, the days when just the sight of her could get his blood flowing a little faster through his veins, the days when his hands moved to touch her of their own volition.  The difference was, he and Renee hadn’t worked together, hadn’t had offices literally within sight of each other with four other coworkers working in close proximity. 

Lou had cleared his throat to let them know he was in the doorway, and Steve had immediately pulled his hand back as both men had straightened their bodies and their expressions.

“What’s up?” Steve asked, as if he and Danny had just been discussing a case.

Lou had rolled his eyes.  Love really did make a man stupid, and with two of them in this relationship, the stupid just multiplied.

“Look, this isn’t why I came in here, but I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about this.”

“Talk about what?” Danny asked innocently.

“Don’t get me wrong, I am happy for you two,” Lou told them honestly.  “Genuinely happy that you finally got past what was holding you back, and you went for it, but office romances…there’s a balance you have to strike.  Okay?  Boundaries that must be established, not just out of respect for those you work with, but for yourselves.  Work is work and home is home.”

“So what are you saying?” Danny asked.  “I can’t bend Steve over his desk until _after_ office hours?”

“Wait,” Steve interrupted.  “I thought I bent you over your desk after hours, you bend me over mine during our lunch break.”

“That’s just on odd days,” Danny corrected.  “On even, I bend you over _my_ desk, and you bend _me_ over yours.” Danny’s hands were pantomiming the relative positions as he explained them, even adding a little wrist action to really drive his point home. 

Lou decided, right then and there, he was going to have to go back to his place and make sweet, sweet heterosexual love to his wife to erase those images forever.

“But the timing?” Steve asked.

“Oh yeah, that stays the same,” Danny agreed.  “You get it at lunch, I get it after work.  That is, if Lou agrees that meets the definition of his boundaries.” Danny formed a little box in the air with his fingers to define said boundaries before crossing his arms across his chest.

“Alright,” Lou waved them off as he turned from the room, “if you aren’t going to take this seriously, fine.  I’ll just order some blackout curtains for the offices and earplugs for everyone.”

Steve was chuckling, but he did call, “No, Lou, Lou, come back.”  When Lou turned and stood silently with eyebrows raised waiting, Steve continued.  “We get it, we really do.  There’s no need for curtains or anything like that.  Nothing is going to change around here, we promise.”

Lou snorted.  “Man, things have already changed around here.”

Danny’s nose crinkled as he tilted his head.  “Yeah, but have they really?”

“Of course they have.  There’s touching,” Lou told them, ticking off the list of changes on his fingers, “and moon-eyed glances, and little private conversations between the two of you in your offices, and you bicker about the most ridiculous things like an old married couple….”  Lou paused, thought about what he was saying, thought about what Danny had said.  “Huh.”  Maybe things really hadn’t changed; maybe everyone just finally understood them for what they had been all along, Steve and Danny included.

“See? Huh? See what I mean?” Danny concurred with a tap at his temple and nod of his head.

“Private stuff stays private,” Steve promised again. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

For the most part, they had kept the private stuff private, at least in the office.  If anything, all the things they had been doing for years just became sharper, more focused, the emotion behind them a little more heightened.  Maybe Danny’s reaction to Steve being taken today was more intense now that they were a couple, but in all honesty, Lou didn’t think Danny would be any calmer, any less worried, if they weren’t sleeping together.  Lou was worried sick about his friend and he had no desire to bend him over anything.

Lou picked up the photo of the moving van.  Danny’s idea about having the a/c turned back made sense, so he studied it closely for any clue as to where the building behind the van was located.  It just looked like a typical generic office building with a tinted glass façade…a glass façade that was reflecting something.  Lou squinted trying to make out the image, finally taking the magnifying glass on Tani’s desk to look a little closer.  It kind of looked like the word ‘sand’ reflected backwards with a little cartoon sunshine…maybe.  Hell, in the islands, that could be anything.  Half the businesses here had sun and sand in the name.

“Hey, Lou?” Jerry’s voice pulled Lou from his thoughts. “Mind if I run something by you?”

“Sure, what you got?”

“I’ve been going through all the maintenance records of the HVAC systems on these buildings,” Jerry explained, “and a few of them that flagged with elevated temps and had recent lease changes came up here in Honolulu.” 

“Yeah, but Steve was insistent that it was raining this morning where he was being held,” Lou reminded.

“But what if it wasn’t rain he was hearing?” Jerry suggested.  “What if it was the sprinkler system?”

Lou stood as he asked, “What did you find?”

The two men headed back to the tech table, and Jerry pulled up a few files.  “Look, see this?  It’s the irrigation system records for this building that had the temperatures set back, and the sprinkler zone on the east side started running when Steve called the first time.”

“What’s the address?” Lou demanded.

“It’s at 943 Kawaiahoa Street,” Jerry told him.

“What’s located across the street?” Lou asked, still holding the photo in his hand.

Jerry seemed a little confused by the question, but quickly pulled up the map with street view.  “Looks like, Sunny’s Sandwich Shop.”

Lou tapped at the photo. “That’s the marquee for the shop reflected in the window.   Jerry my man, I think you’re on to something.  It’s only about fifteen minutes from here.  I’ll call HPD for backup and head over there myself.”

“I’ll call Danny on his radio,” Jerry offered, “let him know what we found.”

By the time Lou got back from his call to HPD, Jerry was on the line, but not with Danny; Rachel’s desperate voice spoke through the line instead.

“Tani and Junior are a little busy at the moment,” Rachel was saying tensely. “But we hit heavy traffic, and now there are gunmen and motorcycles.”

Lou barely heard Jerry saying something about an overturned fuel truck, hazmat responses, and closed roads, but the traffic map he brought up showed nothing but red in all directions around them.  All he could think was, ‘Oh, Lord, what have those two gotten into now?’  He honestly wasn’t sure which dynamic duo worried him more, Steve and Danny, or Tani and Junior.  Between the four of them, his ulcers were developing ulcers.

Lou took a deep breath and asked, “What do you mean, ‘Tani and Junior are a little busy’?”

“Tani is driving very aggressively,” Rachel explained, “and Junior, well, presently, he’s mostly out the window shooting.”

Mostly out the window?  _Mostly?_ Why was _any_ of that boy out the damn window?

Lou could hear gunshots through the phone, as well as Tani yelling, “Junes, hold on!” followed by squealing tires, a loud metallic crunch, and a lot more wind noise.

Rachel exclaimed, “Oh, dear God!  Charlie, keep your head down!”

Lou could empathize with that sentiment.

“Rachel,” Lou tried to sound as calm as possible, which was a little tough against the backdrop of Tani’s somewhat maniacal laughter as a precursor to her saying something about it not being her car, “how much further until you reach the airport?”

“Junior says we’re no longer going to the airport,” Rachel was yelling to be heard over the noise.  “He believes we are cutoff, and has another plan.” 

In the background, he could hear Tani yelling, “Tell Danny to stay away from the airport.  We’ll take care of his family; we’ll call when they’re…fuck! You don’t own the whole goddamn road, asshole!”  The last was accompanied by a honking horn.

Tani, God love her.  Lou had decided the first week they met, if you took Steve’s fearlessness and reckless nature, threw it in a blender with Danny’s temperament and mouth, and hit pulse a few times, you’d pour out a tall, cool drink of Tani Rey. Likewise, if you took McGarrett’s deadly skill and determination, mixed it in a bowl with Williams’ uncharacteristically quiet intellect and by-the-books conviction, rolled it out and sprinkled it with the fierce loyalty they both possessed, you could bake it for ten to twelve minutes and have yourself a Junior Reigns cookie.  They were polar opposites, and yet they had come to balance each other out over the past year in much the same way as Steve and Danny had over the past eight, thankfully without the constant bickering.   Although, at the moment, Lou was worried about both their sanity.

“Rachel, where are you guys?” Lou asked.

“Uhm…it appears we’re on the H201 heading north,” she told him.  There was the sound of crashing glass and a harrowing moment of screaming.

“Rachel!” Lou yelled in his own alarm.

“We’re okay,” she assured.  “I really should go…Charlie, I’m not saying again, keep your head down!”

The phone disconnected, and Lou ordered, “Get them some backup out there, _now_.  And don’t you say a goddamn word to Danny about what you heard.  Tell him to stay clear of the airport, and I’ll meet him at Kawaiahoa Street.”

“Danny’s already on his way to the address,” Lou told him.  “He got stuck in the same traffic on his way to Rachel’s house.  He was only a few blocks away from the building when I called.”

“Are you serious?” Lou exclaimed. “He’ll go in on his own!”

Lou grabbed his vest and shotgun and headed for the door, hoping like hell he’d get there in time for both his teammates.  When he found Rachel’s car Danny had been driving abandoned on the side of the road not far from the building, Lou was worried he might be too late.

~H50~H50~H50~H50~H50~

Junior loved working with Tani Rey.  From the moment they’d met, he felt like something had just clicked.  He wavered between feeling as though he had a sister again and maybe wanting something more. Not that Tani didn’t have a complicated set of personal problems, but, hey, Junior came with plenty of his own baggage, and maybe that was why they had meshed so well in the first place.  He didn’t judge her, and she didn’t judge him.  He hadn’t had a friend like that in…hell, since Maya had died.  No, the biggest concern Junior had with Tani was that the crazier she acted, the more beautiful she became. Maybe that was more a problem with him than her, but there was just something about the way her face flushed with color, her eyes sparkled, her whole being just lit up when she stopped thinking about the consequences of what she was doing and just did it.   It honest to God sometimes took Junior’s breath away.  Her recklessness went against so much of the discipline he’d learned in the Navy.  Still, he had to admit that it wasn’t such a bad thing to watch a beautiful, competent woman do her job-- unless, of course, he was sitting in the open window of a car shooting at several members of the Triad on motorcycles who were chasing them and their bosses’ family.

“Junes, hold on!” Tani ordered. At that moment, she was absolutely radiant.

It was the most terrifying thing Junior had ever seen, and that included the gun-wielding motorcyclist who was closing in on the driver’s side of the car.

Junior didn’t waste time asking what she had planned; he simply reached in to tightly grip the Jesus-bar inside the window of the car.  He hoped like hell that the seatbelt he’d wrapped several times around his leg for stability would keep him from flying out onto the pavement of the freeway Tani was blazing down at speeds no car this age should be able to maintain.  Just as the motorcycle was pulling up beside her, Tani simultaneously slammed on the brakes and flung open her door.  She even used her foot to kick the door to add a little extra oomph to the velocity that was already pulling the door out and into the direct path of the motorcycle.  The bike hit the door with enough force that it ripped it partially from the frame of the car, and Junior could feel the impact vibrate through his bones.  The rider went flying, and within a few feet of Tani returning to full speed, the door ripped the rest of the way off.  Junior watched it skitter down the centerline of the highway as the SUV running with the bikes swerved to miss it.

Tani laughed hysterically.  “God, I love driving cars that aren’t mine.”

Junior had never seen her look more beautiful or wild-eyed crazy than right then. The strains of Britney Spears’ _Toxic_ blasting from the vintage stereo only enhanced the insanity of the moment.  

Junior firmly believed he owed his life to Steve McGarrett.  No matter how many times Steve had said all he wanted as payment for taking Junior in off the streets, for giving him a chance at his dream job, was for Junior to complete the police academy, he would never consider his debt paid in full.  After today, however, he thought he might have made a decent down payment.  Not to mention, Danny was going to owe him a shit ton of malasadas, despite any previous arguments Junior may have made to the contrary.

Before Junior and Tani could head down the back stairway of the Palace with Rachel, Grace and Charlie, Danny had snagged his arm.

“Listen, I know I don’t have to tell you that there is no one, no single thing in the whole world, more precious to me than Grace and Charlie.”

“Sir…” Junior stopped him before he could say anymore.  “…you have my word; I will protect them with my life.”

“I know you will, and that’s why I’m trusting you with them, and it’s why Steve trusts you with them, too.  Just yesterday, he said if we couldn’t trust a former Navy Seal, to watch over them, who could we trust?  I want you to know I agree with him; you’re the best person for this job. Not just because of your training, but because you’re a good person and a better friend.”  Danny gave a little wobble of his head.  “And I’ll owe you a whole dozen malasadas when this is over and done with.”

Junior gave a small laugh to cover his discomfiture at the praise. “Like I’ve told you before, you don’t owe me anything.”

It was a long running joke with them that had started when Steve and Junior would go for their monthly reserve exercises together.  Danny always gave Steve a ride to the base, even before they’d started dating.  When Junior was still living at Steve’s house, he’d drop them both, and every time, he’d show up with coffees for everyone and a bag of malasadas for Junior.  The first time, Steve had tried to steal one, and Danny had slapped his hand away.

“These are not for you,” Danny told him sternly.

“Why not?” Steve had demanded.  “Why does Junior merit pastries and I don’t?”

“Because I know you,” Danny explained. 

“And I know you,” Steve countered, “That doesn’t stop me from sharing my malasadas with you when I get some.”

“If you’ll shut up for three seconds and let me finish, I’ll explain,” Danny told him.

“Please,” Steve urged with a wave of his arm, “explain.  I’m dying to hear this.”

“Funny you should mention dying,” Danny said, then continue.  “I _know you_ well enough to know that you’ll watch out for the kid during these little war games of yours without a bribe.  I also know you well enough to know Junior may need a little more incentive to watch your back this weekend.” 

Steve had rolled his eyes then snatched the bag from Junior’s hand.  “He doesn’t need to watch my back,” Steve countered, pulling a sugar coated donut and stuffing it in his mouth.  “And if I did need someone to watch my back, he doesn’t need a bribe to do it.  Isn’t that right, Junior?”

“Yes, sir, no bribes necessary,” Junior confirmed.

Danny was shaking his head with a disgusted expression.  “I need a bribe to put up with you and your talking while chewing on a daily basis. Let’s go; wouldn’t want you two to be marked tardy or AWOL or get demerits because someone is a greedy, stealing bastard.”

So, that had been the start of it, and it had continued every month for the past year, even after Junior had stopped riding with them when he got a place of his own.

The last time had been the month before when they’d actually been leaving for their annual two weeks, Junior had found Steve and Danny drinking their coffee as they leaned shoulder to shoulder against the hood of Danny’s car.  As Junior walked across the parking lot at the base to join them, he could hear them arguing about a movie.

“You can’t go see that while I’m gone,” Steve was saying.            

“How about we go see it, say we didn’t see it, then see it again when you’re home?” Danny offered.

Steve took a sip of his coffee with a shake of his head.  “You can’t say you didn’t see it.  I’d know if you saw it.”

“You’d never know,” Danny dismissed.

“Oh, I’d know.” Steve argued. “You might not know I know, but I’d know.”

Danny leaned away from Steve, a disbelieving expression on his face.  “How would you know?”

“Because, I’d…I’d just know.” Steve insisted, “I would definitely know.”

“What? Are you spying on us while you’re gone?”

“I’m not spying on you,” Steve scoffed at the idea.  “I’d know. Charlie would tell me when I got back.”

“Yeah,” Danny relented, “he probably would.  He’s at the tattletale age.”

“He wouldn’t tell me to snitch.” Steve frowned at the suggestion. “He’d tell me because he looks up to me.”

“The only reason he looks up to you is because you’re freakishly tall.”

Steve glared.  “He looks up to me because he loves me.”

With a shrug, Danny admitted, “Sure he loves you; that doesn’t mean he respects you.”

“Of course he respects me.  He loves and respects me.” Steve brought the hand with the coffee cup together with his empty one.  “Love and respect, they go together.”

Danny snorted into his own coffee.  “Come talk to me in ten years when he’s a teenager and tell me if you still believe that.”

“Look, if you have to go see a movie, how about you guys go see that one Grace wants to see?” Steve compromised.  “The one with the kid, with the hair, and the eyes.”

“The hair and the eyes?  You’ve investigated how many crimes on this damn island and that’s the extent of your description?” Danny shook his head in disappointment.  “Does he have a mouth and nose, too?  Maybe a couple of arms and legs to go along with it?”

 “You know, the hair, the poofy-haired guy she thinks is so cute.” Steve moved his hand around his head, as if to reenact the hair in question.

 “Ohhhh yeah, that one,” Danny acknowledged before he shook his head.  “No, if I have to suffer through that one, so do you.”

“Why do I have to watch that one but can miss the other one?” Steve demanded.  “Just because you’re miserable, I have to be miserable, too?”

“Yes,” Danny stated succinctly.

"Why?” Steve asked just as simply.

“Because you love and respect me,” Danny told him.

Steve sighed and took another sip of coffee.  “I knew that was going to come back to bite me in the ass one of these days.”  It didn’t stop him from leaning a little harder into Danny’s shoulder.

When Junior had closed the distance, Danny straightened and offered over the coffee carrier he held with the cup of Kona and the bag of malasadas balanced on top.  “Cutting it a little close, aren’t you, Junior?  I was starting to think I was going to have to find someone else to bribe to keep this one alive.”

When Steve rolled his eyes, Junior, yet again, shook his head.  “No bribes necessary, sir, you know that.”

“Oh, well, in that case…” Danny started pulling back the food.

Junior, however, snatched it before he could.  “But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the breakfast.”

“Last decent meal before you sailors ship out, I guess.”  Junior didn’t miss the melancholy tone of Danny’s voice.   A weekend was one thing, apparently two weeks was something else in Danny’s book. It dawned on Junior this was probably the longest they would have been apart since they’d become a couple.  “Unless, of course, you’re like this Neanderthal and consider an MRE fine dining.”

“The chicken a la king aren’t too bad,” Junior admitted, “although given a choice, I’ll take the malasadas.”

“Good to know the SEALs don’t brain damage all their initiates,” Danny said with a smirk.

Steve glanced at his watch.  “Shit, we need to get going.”  He bent down to grab his duffle and slung it on his shoulder before turning to Danny.  “I’ll call you when I can,” he promised, before he snagged Danny’s t-shirt and dropped a quick kiss on his lips. “Love you guys.”

“Love you, too. See you in two weeks,” Danny told Steve as he smoothed out the fabric of Steve’s shirt where he’d been gripping it tightly. He turned to Junior.  “You make sure of that, or your pastry days are over.”

“Yes, sir,” Junior promised, forcing a solemn expression through his grin at the threat.

Steve turned Junior toward the aircraft hangars and gave him a little shove to get him moving as he fell into step beside him.  “Don’t encourage him; I’m the one who has to live with him.”

“Is that why you’re not?” Junior asked.

“Aren’t what? “

“Living with Danny; I mean, he still has his house,” Junior clarified. “I thought maybe you were putting off moving in together because I was still living at your place.” That had been a big part of why Junior had moved out; he didn’t want to put Steve in the awkward position of having to ask him to leave. “But it’s been months, and he still hasn’t moved in.”

“Huh.” Steve looked like he hadn’t even considered it before, at least not seriously. “You know, I don’t really know why he hasn’t moved in yet.”

“Have you asked him to?”

Steve seemed taken aback by Junior’s question. “I guess I haven’t.  Not officially anyway. But he should know I’d be good with that, right?”

Steve glanced back over his shoulder, at where Danny had been parked. He gave a small chuckle at what he saw.

Junior looked back, as well, and saw Danny still sitting on the hood of the Camaro, watching them walk across the parking lot as he drank his coffee, showing no intention of leaving any time soon. 

Danny gave a little wave, but didn’t move from his spot as he shouted.  “Have fun storming the castle!”

Steve turned around, but kept walking backwards as he spread his arms and yelled back, “As you wish!”

“Yeah, okay,” Danny conceded with a hand over his heart, then followed it up with a dismissive wave, “you romantic piece of shit, you win.”

The smile for Danny was still on his face when Steve turned back around, but it was rueful now.  “Man, I’ve got to tell you, Junior, this is weird.”

“Commander?” Junior asked in confusion, unsure which weird part he was referencing… Danny calling him a piece of shit and romantic in the same sentence, or that he and Danny were actually in a competition in the first place.

Apparently, it was neither.

“I’ve spent most of my life being shipped off someplace… to school, OTS, training, BUD/S, missions in every hotspot on the globe, and it really never bothered me before.  In fact, after a while, I kind of looked forward to it. It was when we got back that things seemed… I don’t know…off.  I was more at home out there than here. You know? And now…”

Steve snuck another look behind, saw Danny still there, turned back, and kept walked. “I’ve never had someone waiting for me to come home, much less waiting for me while I left.”  He shook his head, seemingly, at how ridiculous it was. 

“It must be nice to finally have that,” Junior told him, feeling a twinge of jealousy.  Sure, he’d had friends he kept in touch with, at least for a while, after he joined the military.   His mom had worried over him plenty, he knew, so had his dad in his own way, he supposed.  Still, he’d been a lot like Steve in that the Navy had always seemed easier, even with people shooting at him, than coming home.

“It just feels different,” Steve admitted.  “Good different…well, bad but for good reasons.  I just keep thinking how I’m going to miss Charlie’s soccer game tomorrow, and Grace has a World Government presentation on Tuesday that she’s been working on for weeks, and Danny...”  The headshake was back, like there weren’t words for why he’d miss Danny, or maybe there were too many.  “I know people do this all the time, leave their family behind and go and put it on the line every day.  It’s just… I went twenty years without any of it, and now I suddenly have… shit, I have all of it.  I guess I have a hell of a lot more respect for those guys now than I did before, because even two weeks seems too long to be away from them.”

Life was getting better for Junior, too. He had reconciled with his dad. Things weren’t perfect, but they were getting better. On top of that, now he had the Five–0 team that was more and more like family every day.  Tani had even made him dinner the night before as a sort of send off, telling him to be safe at least three different times. So he could definitely relate to what Steve was saying if not for the exact same reasons.

“I don’t know, Commander, it looks like I got a few more malasada in the bag this time,” Junior told him with a grin, hoping to pull him out of a homesickness that had started before they had even left the parking lot.  “Two weeks is working out pretty well for me.”

“You know that whole watching my back thing—"

Junior stopped him before he could continue.  “Sir, I know you don’t need anyone to watch your back.  And even if you did, I’m serious, it is my honor and privilege to do it, and to have you watch mine in return.”

“I feel the same way, Junes.” Steve patted his shoulder.  “But those kids, Grace and Charlie, I love them, and I’d do anything for them. But they need their dad a lot more than they need their Uncle Steve.  You understand what I’m saying?”

Junior frowned at what Steve was implying—Steve’s ‘anything’ would be to sacrifice himself to ensure Danny was there for them. If it came down to a choice between the lives of Steve or Danny on the job, Junior was to pick Danny.  “I think they need both of you.  More than that, I think their dad needs you.”

“Here’s the thing about Danny; he’d do anything for those kids, too,” Steve explained, “even live without me.”

“I understand what you’re asking me,” Junior admitted.

“Good.” Steve gave one satisfied nod of his head. “Do I need to buy you malasadas?”

“No, sir,” Junior assured him. “But I plan to do everything in my power to avoid that situation by keeping both of you alive.”

“That’s my plan, too.” Steve gripped Junior’s shoulder. “And sometimes that means being a SEAL over a cop.”

Having gone through both the rigors of SEAL training and the police academy, Junior understood the difference.  They were subtle, but they were there.  In the military, guns weren’t used to intimated or threaten, they were used to kill.  If you confirmed intent to do harm by your enemy, if you had visual on the weapon, you took that enemy down.  There was no identifying yourself through verbalization, no attempt to deescalate and disarm, but you also never pointed your gun at someone unless you were prepared to kill.

“So when I talk Danny into moving in with me, are you going to help with the move?”

Junior smiled. “The El Camino is at your service.”

So far, that call hadn’t come, but it sounded like it might soon. That was if they found Steve in time. Junior, however, couldn’t think about that right now; his priority was to keep Grace and Charlie safe, both during transport and upon arrival at the airport.  The way he saw it, that was living up to the promises he’d made to Steve _and_ Danny.

“Ramos has told his men to bring their car around,” Junior told Danny.  “Once the ambulance arrives at the front entrance for Alejandro, we’ll use that as cover to go out the back.”

“Good idea,” Danny agreed, then went to talk to his family.

Danny pocketed the keys to Rachel’s car she handed over, then knelt down to talk directly to Charlie.  “Look at us; we’re practically twins, you and me.”   Danny’s smile grew strained as he tightened the straps on the bulletproof vest that was threatening to swallow the small boy even adjusted down as much as the straps would allow.

The vest may have been identical to the one Danny wore, but Charlie was still wearing his pajamas, and it gave the impression that he had put on the gear to play an innocent game of cops and robbers.  Charlie was still a little glassy eyed from the antinausea drugs that had had him sleeping most of the morning, but Danny looked just as pale as his son at the thought of Charlie actually needing the vest to stay alive.

Satisfied with his work on the vest, Danny brushed the boy’s bangs from his eyes.  “Hey, you remember what I always say about Uncle Steve on the job?”

“He’s crazy but he’s good?” Charlie offered with a yawn.  

“Yep, he’s good at keeping people safe,” Danny expanded.  “He’s so good at it, in fact, that since he can’t be here right now, it’s going to take Tani _and_ Junior to do his job.   But they’re good, too, and not nearly as crazy as Uncle Steve can be.  So you do what they tell you to do, okay?”

When Charlie nodded solemnly, Danny pulled him into a hug.  “I love you, buddy, and I’ll see you soon.  Okay?”

Danny stood and moved to Grace next, looking over her vest, as well.  “So when you get back from visiting your Granny in England, we’ll work on your parking skills.”

Grace looked on the verge of tears, and she moved in to hug Danny tightly.  “You have to find Uncle Steve.”

“That’s the plan, monkey, but you and your brother need to be safe first.  Uncle Steve wants it that way, too.”  He pushed her back enough to press a kiss to her forehead.  “Danno loves you; Uncle Steve, too.”

She nodded, brushing away tears. “Love you, too.  Both of you.”

“That’s the first thing I’ll tell Steve after I find him…well, one of the first, right after I remind him he’s a idiot for getting kidnapped on a grocery run.”

Gracie snickered at that even through her tears.

In the distance, Junior could hear the ambulance sirens.  “Sir, we need to move out.”

Danny nodded, gave one more kiss to Grace, then turned to Rachel, who was adjusting her own vest.  “You good with that?”

“Yes, Tani showed me how,” Rachel assured testily.

“Rachel, I’m…” Danny started with a rub to his forehead.

Rachel held up a hand to stop her ex-husband from saying anymore.  “Daniel, now is not the time.  Besides, I knew you were a cop when I married you. I knew you were a cop when I had children with you, and I knew you were a cop when I divorced you…not necessarily in that order each time.”  Rachel looked heavenward with a shake of her head, seemingly at her own stupidity for reconciling with Danny, even for a short time.  “I’m not happy, not in the least, but I can’t claim I entered this whole situation blind. I also know you would never do anything intentionally to endanger our children, quite the opposite.   Although some of the consequences of your actions…”  Taking a deep breath, as if to put that argument off for another day, Rachel continued, “The important thing now is that we keep our children safe.  If you believe Tani and Junior can do that, then I trust you.”

“They will,” Danny assured, flashing a meaningful look at his teammates.  “Say hi to your mom for me.”

“Yes, that will go over smashingly,” Rachel told him with an eye roll, then beckoned, “Charlie, come here to mummy.”

“I’ve got him,” Danny offered, lifting the boy into his arms.  “I can at least walk you to the car.”

Junior nodded and explained the plan.  “I’ll take point, followed by Danny and Charlie, Rachel, then Grace.  Tani will have our sixes.  You stay behind me at all times.  Move when I say move, stop when I say stop.  Understand?”

When everyone nodded, Junior hitched his head, indicating they should move out.

They moved quickly down the first flight of stairs with no problems, then Junior saw a flash of black easing down the stairs as he approached the landing for the second floor.  Holding up his fist to halt the rest, he used the scope of his rifle to spot a pair of boots several steps down the next set of stairs.  He motioned for the rest to remain where they were.  Behind him, Danny handed Charlie over to Rachel and pulled his sidearm.  Junior stepped silently onto the landing, in full on SEAL mode, exactly the way Steve had told him to do if necessary to keep Danny and his family safe, to keep _Steve’s_ family safe.  From this angle, he still couldn’t see the man’s face, but he saw what he needed to see-- the man’s gun, raised and waiting for someone to walk into his line of sight.   Another step further and he confirmed it wasn’t anyone he knew.

Junior squeezed the trigger on his rifle.  There wasn’t even a grunt as the man dropped, which just made the sound of his gun clattering down the stairs even louder, but there were no sounds of other would-be assailants either.

Easing around the landing, Junior scanned the stairwell and saw no additional threats.  He signaled for Danny to join him.

“I’m heading down another floor to make sure we’re clear,” he whispered.

Danny nodded in understanding.

It didn’t take long before Junior was back up the stairs to let them know they had a clear path to the exit.  Junior resumed his position in the lead, Danny doing his best to block the view of the dead man from his children as they filed past the body on the trip down the stairs.  Junior left everyone besides Danny on the landing above as he opened the exit door with Danny providing cover.  They found two of Ramos’ men standing next to a late 1970s model Oldsmobile Omega outfitted with a lift kit.  The two men raised their hands when Junior and Danny appeared with their guns.

“Whoa, whoa, Ramos sent us,” one of them explained.

“Did he send the guy in the stairwell, too?” Danny demanded.

“He wasn’t one of ours,” the second defended.

“But you knew he was there,” Junior noted, quickly deducing they hadn’t denied knowledge of his presence.

The man shrugged.  “Not my business to know who goes where.”

Junior pivoted the butt of his rifle around to smash into the guy’s face, no doubt breaking his nose.  “Anyone else we should know about who isn’t your business to know about?”  They may not have been actively trying to kill Five-0, but they didn’t seem to be above aiding and abetting others who might.

“No,” the man grunted as he bent with blood running down his face.  “He was the only one we saw.”

Danny called up to the rest to come out.  Tani stopped short when she saw the car.  “That’s our ride? A car that’s as old as Danny?”

“Hey!” Danny, Rachel, and the one _without_ the busted nose all said at the same time.

The apparent proprietor of the car, the one who wasn’t bleeding down the front of his shirt, caressed his hand adoringly along the rusted body of the vehicle.  “All the love is under the hood, _momacita_ ,” he said, running his other hand down his body in a similar manner, “just like you get with Lolo.” He made a kissy face at Tani to accentuate the point.

Junior considered adding another bloodstain to the butt of his rifle.

Tani, however, screwed her own face in disgust.  “Ew.” Elbowing past him, she opened the back door for Rachel and the kids.

“Who the hell is Lolo?”  Danny asked.

“That’s me,” the owner of the car informed him.

“Lolo?” Danny snorted.  “Seriously, that’s your name?”

“It’s what my friends call me.”

“No, they don’t,” Danny told him with a shake of his head.  “I mean, people might call you that, but if they do, they aren’t your friends.  See, real friends would beat up people who called you that.”

The metallic creak of the door when Tani shut it had the woman grimacing.  “Maybe we should take our chances with the Triad.”

“She may not look pretty, but she can run,” Lolo promised.  “Ain’t nobody going to catch her once she gets going.”  He lowered his sunglasses to the edge of his nose to eye Tani knowingly.

Junior was seriously going to smash in his fucking face if he kept it up with the creepy come-ons.

Before he could, Tani snuck in a kidney punch as she passed him on the way to the driver’s side of the car.

From inside the car, Charlie complained, “It smells funny in here.”

Junior got a distinct whiff of pot when he opened the passenger door.

Lolo was leaning heavily against the hood after the blow he took.  “It’s medicinal.  I have anxiety.”

“Maybe you should try to eliminate some of the stress in your life,” Danny recommended as he straightened from checking on his kids in the car one last time.   “Like maybe look at other career options besides gun smuggling.”

Tani slid into the driver’s seat and started the car. It rumbled to life, along with a Britney Spears cassette tape playing in what appeared to be the original factory installed tape deck in the vehicle.  “Are you _kidding_ me right now?”

Lolo looked affronted at the reaction even as he straightened from his slump.  “Hey, that’s a rare classic import.”

Tani held up the cassette case that displayed a bad photocopy of Britney covered in Asian script.  “It’s a bootleg copy from Thailand.”

“Are you saying that’s not an import?” Lolo seemed genuinely confused.

Tani rolled her eyes and revved the engine.  Even Junior had to admit, it sounded pretty damn powerful; he could feel the reverb of what had to be a 440 V8 under the hood when he climbed into the passenger seat.  Maybe this rust bucket could do some damage after all, not to mention it was built like a damn tank. 

The dangerous glint in Tani’s eyes said she felt the same.

Lolo leaned into the driver-side window.  “I expect you to take care of my baby like she was your own.”

“I’ll try not to scratch the rust patches,” Tani promised as she revved the engine once more. “Buckle up,” she admonished her passengers, as she shifted the car into drive and peeled out of the parking spot, Britney still singing.

Things had gone smoothly at first, and Junior had a moment where he thought, maybe, the cover of the ambulance had let them evacuate the Palace without the others who were watching and waiting to take Danny’s family even noticing. Then they’d hit the traffic and been rerouted several streets over from their intended route.  Tani had slowed to ask one of the traffic cops directing them on yet another detour what was going on and learned a diesel tanker had overturned and was leaking, causing not only traffic rerouting but evacuations of some areas, the result was turning most of downtown Honolulu into a parking lot.

They’d managed to work their way over to the H-1 and things seemed to be going well, until a motorcycle raced up behind them, passed them, and then cut in front of Tani and slowed down.  It was almost immediately joined by a second.

Junior was already gripping his rifle a little tighter as Tani asked warily, “Junes?”

“Be ready,” Junior warned before turning and telling Rachel and the children, “Keep your heads down.”

Rachel nodded tensely in understanding, pushing Charlie’s head down the same time Grace scrunched down as low as possible in her seat.

“We got more company,” Tani told him, looking in the rearview mirror.

Junior turned to see two more motorcycles and an SUV gaining on them quickly.   That’s when he’d rolled down the window and climbed to sit in it, telling Tani, “Hold it as steady as you can.”

Junior took sight of the SUV through the scope of his rifle, saw two men in the front seat, one prepping his own fully automatic weapon.  Junior adjusted his trajectory slightly to account for the deflection the front windshield would cause, squeezed the trigger, and took out the potential gunman.

The SUV swerved but recovered quickly, and the motorcycles sped to catch them.

Junior leaned down to alert Tani.  “They’re coming up fast.”

Junior turned his attention to one of the bikes.  It moved behind another civilian car on the freeway as soon as it saw Junior’s gun trained on him, then darted up to use another for cover, still quickly gaining on them.

The second one was doing the same and coming up at an alarming rate on the driver’s side.  Junior took as shot but missed as it wove between cars.  He felt Tani slap his leg in warning, and turned to see one of the bikes up ahead of them had fallen back and the rider was shooting at their car.

Tani already had her own gun out and firing out her window, the shots were blind given she was still trying to drive, but it was enough to have the bike dropping back, and allowing Junior to get off a shot that hit home.

Junior risked a glance down into the car to make sure everyone was okay.

“Fucking crotch rockets,” Tani cursed at the agility of the bikes.

Junior felt the same way as he returned to tracking the ones behind them still using traffic as cover, but based on what they were doing, he extrapolated where the rider would go next.  He took the shot as soon as the motorcycle appeared in the crosshairs of his scope. The rider laid the bike on the pavement and skidded to a stop with another car fishtailing wildly to miss him.

Junior felt the car decelerate and turned to see what had Tani slowing.  There was another SUV and two more motorcycles sitting on the side of the road ahead of them, as if waiting to join the chase.  If they were ahead, that meant they weren’t just following them.  They probably knew they were heading for the airport and would have more waiting there.

Tani evidently came to the same conclusion.  “What do we do?” she yelled up to him.

Junior quickly assessed the situation, decided they weren’t getting to the airport, at least not that way.  “Take the H-201,” he ordered. “We aren’t going to make it to the airport, but we can make a run for help.” If one Navy SEAL was good, a whole team of them at Pearl Harbor would be even better.

“We need to let Danny know he needs to avoid the airport,” Tani said.

“He doesn’t have his phone,” Rachel reminded.

“Call HQ and they can reach him on the radio,” Tani told her as she cut across traffic to merge onto the H-201.

Junior provided cover fire when Tani floored it as they passed the other assailants waiting for them, allowing the Oldsmobile to race ahead.  Now they only had two SUVs and four motorcycles chasing them. 

Piece of cake.

That’s when the one bike made a break for it when Junior was busy shooting at the SUV, and Tani pulled her door trick.

Tani took a break from her laughing to yell, “Tell Danny to stay away from the airport.  We’ll take care of his family; we’ll call when they’re…”

Junior banged frantically on the roof to give Tani a head’s-up of an RV, apparently oblivious of the car chase taking place around it, merging into their lane.

“Fuck!” Tani cursed, laying down on the horn as she swerved onto the shoulder to pass the lumbering vehicle. “You don’t own the whole goddamn road, asshole!” 

Junior tightened his abs, using every ounce of core strength he had to maintain his balance on his perch, but it was enough of a distraction to allow one of the bikes to come up behind them firing.  The back window of the car blew out, accompanied by a multitude of screams from Danny’s family.

Junior’s focus returned, and he took the bike down with a single shot, even as Tani was once again firing out the now empty space where her door once was.

“Everybody okay?” Junior asked anxiously.  There was no way in hell he was going to let Steve and Danny down after they trusted him to get their family somewhere safe.

Rachel finished chastising Charlie to keep his head down before answering that they were uninjured.

“I’m out.” Tani tossed her service weapon aside then reached as far as she could under the steering console.  “Rachel?”

“Yes?” Rachel answered hesitantly.

“Check under my seat, between the seats, in the roof, anywhere,” Tani directed, “It’s a gunrunner’s car.  There’s probably a small arsenal in here somewhere.”

Junior pulled his own handgun from the holster on his leg and dropped it for Tani to use, then turned his attention back to the cars in pursuit.

In the intervening miles, Junior managed to take out one of the SUVs and another bike, and Rachel must have found a few more guns, including a submachine gun given the rapid fire when Tani joined in, as well. The Triad, however, had called in reinforcements, probably from the airport, to replace those he’d removed from the equation.  Still, they would be reaching Pearl Harbor in about four miles, if he could just hold them off for a few minutes more.

That’s when Tani hit the brakes again with another exclamation of, “Fuck!”

Junior couldn’t argue with her assessment when he turned to see the entire road up ahead blocked by a pickup and two other cars.  His mind raced through every option he could think of, none of them good, and all of them having an ending that would likely involve those in the car with him hurt or killed.

“Should I ram them?” Tani asked, coming to a complete stop in the middle of the road and revving the engine before deciding, “Screw it; I’m going to ram them.”       

Junior, however, noticed that the cars and bikes behind them had also come to a stop.  He turned, using his scope to check out who was in the vehicles ahead when one person started waving.  Junior exhaled in relief to see Mike behind one of the cars. Evan had a rifle of his own propped on the hood of the truck and took a shot at the SUV behind Junior’s car even as Tani floored it.

Junior immediately slid back into the passenger seat.  “They’re friendlies,” he informed Tani with a smile.

Tani, however, was looking at him as if he was speaking a foreign language.  “What?”  She also wasn’t slowing down.

“Friendlies!” Junior repeated, a little more desperately, and trying his best to slam on an imaginary set of brakes on the passenger side of the car.  “I know them!  They’re SEALs! My team from Nigeria! ”

“Shit!” Tani exclaimed as the words sunk in and she realized how close she was getting to their unexpected reinforcements.

Even Mike, Evan, and the other men with them looked to being weighing whether they should keep shooting or bolt for safety.

Tani slammed on the brakes, sending the car into a sideways slide that skidded to a stop a few feet from the vehicles blocking the road. Tani gave a small wave with an awkward smile from her fully exposed seat thanks to her door going missing several miles back.  “Hey, there.   How’s everybody doing?”

Behind him, Junior heard Charlie exclaim, “Awesome!  Can we do that again?”

“Absolutely not,” Rachel told him as she opened the door and quickly ushered the children out and behind the barricade Junior’s unit had formed for them.  It wasn’t really needed anymore, seeing as the Triad had turned tail and ran.

Mike came around the car with a shake of his head.  “Looks like we missed out on the real fun.”

Junior took the offered hand and shook it gratefully.  “How…?” was all he could say, still in shock that they were there.

“We heard you might need some help.”  Mike handed over the phone from his pocket.

Junior took it with a confused expression. “Hello?”

“Junior,” Joe White said on the other end of the line with obvious relief to hear his voice.  “Is everyone alright?”

“Yes, sir,” Junior told him, in even more surprise to hear the older man’s voice.  “Commander, how did you know?”

“Jerry called me when Rachel said you were on the H-201,” Joe explained.  “He figured you were making a run for Pearl Harbor and thought I could help with some reinforcements.”

Good ol’ Jerry. Junior was never going to be able to make this up to him.  “Sir, you have no idea how grateful—“

“Considering my predicament the last time I saw you,” Joe interrupted, “I definitely have some idea about being grateful.”

“Did Jerry happen to mention any word on Steve?” Junior asked.

“Only that they had a very strong lead on where he was being held,” Joe told him, the concern obvious in his own voice, “and that Danny was probably already there.”  

“That’s good news,” Junior said, feeling genuine hope for the first time today.

“I can give you the address if you want,” Joe offered.

Junior was tempted.  He would love to be providing cover for both Steve and Danny, but he had other priorities right now.  Looking over to where Rachel stood with arms protectively around Grace and Charlie, Junior told him, “Thanks for the offer, but I have another mission.”

“Grace and Charlie,” Joe surmised correctly.

“Yes, sir.  I’m supposed to get them to the airport.”

“Skip the airport, son.  Take them to the base instead,” Joe advised.  “Safest place for them.”

“My thoughts, as well.”

“Let me know about Steve,” Joe ordered.           

“As soon as I do, so will you,” Junior promised before returning the phone to Mike.

“Need a little help with the babysitting duties?” Mike offered.

Junior nodded with a smile.  “Sure won’t turn down the offer.”

Tani stood staring at the Oldsmobile, and Junior joined her.  “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I was just thinking.” She sighed with a slight shake of her head.  “That was kind of nuts, you know?  All those bullets flying—“

Junior stopped her before she could second-guess anything that had happened.  “Hey, you were amazing out there.  That was some incredible driving.”

“Yeah?” Tani bumped against his shoulder with a slow smile.  “You were pretty badass yourself.” 

Junior shrugged self-consciously at the compliment.  “All part of the training,” he dismissed.

Tani waved her arm at the car. “Still, all those bullets flying and not a damn one could hit that stupid tape deck.”

Britney was still singing about how she had that boom boom.

“I could shoot it for you,” Junior offered.

Tani seemed to be considering it before saying, “Nah.  Lolo’s anxiety is going to be high enough as it is after he sees the door.”

Junior draped an arm around her shoulder and turned her toward the cars behind them.  “Admit it; you’re going to miss that car.”

“Maybe,” she finally conceded, “just a little.”    


	5. Chapter 5

There was a reason Steve was supposed to stay awake.  The memory of why kept flicking around in his brain, like a gnat buzzing in his peripheral vision, but for some reason he just couldn’t catch sight of it.  Something about Danny… Danny would be there soon, would be home soon, and Steve should stay awake for him.  Although, Danny had some great ways of waking him up when he came in late and Steve was already asleep.  On one spectacular occasion, Steve had woke to find that amazing dream he was having wasn’t actually a dream, and Steve was already half gone with Danny’s mouth and tongue working overtime on his dick.  So maybe drifting off wasn’t such a bad thing if that’s what he had to look forward to in the end.

It wasn’t.

The sound of shattering glass cut through the haze, but no way any of the shards could be as sharp as Danny’s voice that was breaking as he demanded,  “Steven, I swear to God, you better wake the fuck up and answer me.”

Steve opened his eyes to see a busted smoke alarm on the ceiling over his head, and reality slammed home.  He was locked up, trapped in a concrete room, and Danny was looking for him.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Danny exclaimed in absolute relief from somewhere above him, and Steve turned to see Danny scrubbing a hand across his face that was peering in the small, now broken, window.  Eddie’s head was bobbing anxiously behind Danny’s, trying to get a look in himself.

“Danny,” Steve exhaled in his own gratitude to see them.

“Hold on, I’ll be in there in a minute,” Danny promised then reported through his radio.   “He’s here.  What’s the ETA on the ambulance?”    

Steve couldn’t hear the response since Danny was wearing his earpiece, but by his expression, he knew it wasn’t good.  “Yeah, the traffic’s insane. I had to abandon my car several blocks away.  Get it here as soon as you can, Jerry.  He’s conscious, but Christ, there’s a lot of blood.”  Then he patted Eddie.  “Come on, let’s go find Steve.”

By the time Steve managed to stand and make his way to brace himself against the door, he could hear Danny calling his name in the hallway.  Steve banged on the door, and immediately heard Eddie scratching on the other side.  “In here!  Danny!”

“Stand back,” Danny cautioned, “I need to shoot off a padlock.”

Steve moved to lean with his back to the wall and yelled, “Clear!”

A shot rang out, followed by a swift mule kick to the door that had the frame splintering as it flew open.              

Eddie bounded in, but Steve could hear Danny curse from the hallway. 

“Shit!” was immediately followed by a gunshot, and Danny returning fire as he backed into the room before taking cover against the wall on the opposite side of the door from Steve.

“Where’s your backup?” Steve demanded as a barrage of bullets, obviously from a fully automatic weapon, had Danny flinching away from the shrapnel from cement wall and wooden doorframe.

“You’re my backup,” Danny countered over the sound of gunfire. 

“You came in here alone?” Steve asked in shock. “What were you thinking?”

“What was I thinking?”  Danny spread his arms wide.  “I was thinking, ‘Steve McGarrett, welcome to my goddamn world’!” Before Steve could say anything more about how irresponsible that was, the firing subsided. “Not so fun, is it?” Danny checked his gun.  “Steve, stay,” he ordered. “You, too,” he told Eddie, before raising his sidearm and stepping back into the hallway.

Of course, Steve ignored him. He was the backup, after all, even without a gun.  Although, given the way the room spun, he could do little more than simply lean so he could look out the door and see what Danny was doing. Eddie protectively shadowed Steve’s every move, and Steve rubbed absently behind the dogs ears as they watched Danny work.

Danny moved like a cop, always had, always would.  As much as Steve had tried to bring some of the military discipline that had served him so well in the Navy and teach it to the team, he hadn’t been able to break Danny of the way he approached an entrance. Still, it had never kept Danny from being an amazing partner.  To be honest, once the shit went hot, Steve couldn’t remember a time he’d been able to watch Danny engage an adversary.  Steve was either too busy in the gunfight to notice exactly what Danny was up to, or he was off in another part of the building tackling bad guys out of windows during hand to hand combat. Steve kind of regretted missing out on watching Danny in the past, because now that he had the chance, it was a thing of beauty to behold.

Danny moved down the hallway with a deliberation that had Steve’s mouth going dry, taking what minimal cover he could from doorways while doggedly returning fire.  The man with the automatic weapon went down just as a shot came from behind them.  Danny turned, fired off two rounds, then staggered and went down flat on his back when he took a couple of hits center mass. 

‘Vest,’ Steve told himself, even though his heart was instantly in his throat, ‘Danny’s wearing his vest’.  It didn’t stop Steve from lunging at the asshole who had shot Danny when he came in line with the door.  Steve slammed him into the far wall and stumbled back, fighting to stay on his feet even as he saw the man recover and point his gun at him.  Eddie growled, preparing to attack, but the shooter dropped with three bullets to the chest from Danny, who was still on his back with only his head and gun raised.

Danny climbed quickly to his feet, even though he grimaced at the bruised ribs he now, no doubt, had.  Waving a hand to encompass his upper body, Danny enunciated, “Bo-dy ar-mor,” careful to articulate each syllable. He waved a hand toward the same region of Steve’s body.  “T-shirt.  You _mor-on_.”

Before Steve could argue that he was the backup and took that role seriously, Eddie growled again in warning.  Steve found himself pressed against the wall, Danny apparently deciding if Steve didn’t have his own body armor, he’d personally play the role.  In the distance, Steve could make out a dark, backlit figure at the far end of the hall.  The silhouette was framed in the doorway that exited into the bright sunlight outside, but Steve could see the shape of the gun in the person’s hand. 

Without hesitation, Danny fired until his slide locked back, and the shadow disappeared when the door shut again.  Danny simply popped the empty magazine free, and had slammed another clip home by the time the first had heedlessly clattered to the floor. Already moving down the hallway toward the door, Danny’s eyes narrowed intently as he waiting for the assailant to reappear.  As soon as the door opened, Danny took the shot.  His reward was a grunt as the shadow dissolved into blackness when the door swung shut yet again.  Danny waited a few seconds, but the door didn’t reopen.  He checked once more behind him, saw nothing, then finally lowered his weapon as he sucked in one ragged breath after another.

Steve felt weak in the knees by how fucking _hot_ Danny was during the whole ordeal…although blood loss may have been a contributing factor. 

Whatever the reason, it had Danny exclaiming, “Whoa, babe, I got you,” as he rushed back to Steve’s side and wrapped his free arm around Steve’s waist to prop him up.

Steve slumped against him, his goddamn legs just didn’t seem to want to cooperate, and rested his forehead against Danny’s temple.

“Come on,” Steve murmured in Danny’s ear, “drop ‘em, and whip that bad boy out.”

“What?”  Danny sounded more worried about the way Steve’s words slurred than outraged at the request

“If you’re going to prove what a massive dick you have to every two-bit criminal in town,” Steve elaborated, “there’s no way I’m missing out on the action.”

“I think you need your blood in other areas more than your crotch right now, Steven,” Danny countered.

Steve huffed a weak laugh.  “What?  Think I can’t get it up for you in the middle of an escape?”

“If anyone could, it would be you, babe,” Danny conceded with a chuckle of his own, holding Steve a little tighter.

Steve liked to think it was because Danny wanted to be closer to him, but it probably had just as much to do with the way Steve slipped down a little further. 

“You still with me?” The humor fell away from Danny’s tone, kind of the same way the floor was threatening to do with Steve.

“Always,” Steve promised, even as he rolled his head against Danny’s.  His leg was throbbing, and everything kept going in and out of focus, but he didn’t give a shit, because it felt amazing to have Danny’s arms around again.  No fucking way he was ever giving this up.  “Christ, I love the hell out of you,” Steve confessed breathlessly. 

He felt Danny pull in a stuttering breath.

“I’m not saying it say goodbye, Danno; I’m just saying it because I like to say it.”  He did like saying, liked it a hell of a fucking lot.

“Not as much as I like to hear it,” Danny assured, turning just enough to quickly brush his lips against Steve’s.  “Ready to get out of here?”

“Oh, hell, yeah,” Steve declared, even as his knees buckled beneath him.

“Steve!”

Danny had taken enough of his weight that he stopped Steve from going down completely, but the arm around Steve’s waist tightened on the gunshot wound there, and had white light burning phosphorus-bright behind Steve’s eyelids.  Danny was calling his name, but his voice was growing fainter even as it grew more desperate, and yeah, more pissed.  Steve tried his best to tell Danny it was okay, but his mouth wouldn’t form the words, wouldn’t do anything beyond let a moan of pain drown out everything, even Danny franticly threatening to call off the move if he didn’t open his eyes that goddamn second.

Steve concentrated on prying them open, just a sliver was a chore, and saw Danny’s baby blues staring back. They seemed even bluer than usual through the brimming tears in Danny’s eyes. Steve managed to raise his fingers to brush clumsily against Danny’s jaw, and found them immediately trapped by Danny’s blood-covered hand. Steve absently wondered where the blood had come from, but he had more important things to do.  First on the list was talking Danny out of reneging on his promise to move in with him.  He had all these words in his head, about how he loved waking up in the morning with the sun cutting through the bedroom window to pink Danny’s shoulders, loved the feel of Danny sleeping warm against Steve’s side, and the sound of Danny’s snoring competing with the crash of the waves outside.  He wanted to tell him how he’d already planned the best layout to share the closet and dresser, how he’d figured out a way they could move Charlie’s bed without needing to disassemble it completely, how he wanted Danny to come over for the night and never leave again, how he wanted Danny to be there every night and every day, how he wanted Danny to just _stay_ …

“Stay.”  He forced his lips to form the word.

… stay and be his forever.

When Wo Fat had drugged him, and Steve had found himself lost in hallucinations, he had thought the cruelest part was thinking his dad was still alive when he wasn’t.  Afterwards, he realized the worst part was that, in order to keep his dad, he’d lost his team, his _ohana_.  Chin, Kono, Lou, Jerry…they were all off living their lives in that dream, for good or bad, without Steve, because he’d never come back to Hawaii and founded the task force.  Then he’d think, at least he and Danny had still become friends.  Over the years, however, he’d realized that in the delusion, he’d lost Danny, too.  He belonged to Rachel in that dream, not Steve, and even before they’d started sleeping together, the thought of not having Danny as a cornerstone of his life was almost as hard as losing his dad.  It was one of the main reasons he hated taking painkillers, or any drug, that made him feel out of control.  It brought back memories of that time as Wo Fat’s prisoner when he didn’t know which was fantasy and which was reality, and that fear that he’d lost everyone again, that he’d lost _Danny_ again, always hovered menacingly in the twilight of that in-between realm.

“I’m staying as long as you do,” Danny promised.

Steve had always liked people; but when his mom had supposedly died, and his dad had shipped him off to military school, he’d convinced himself he didn’t need anyone.  Sure, he still liked them, liked hanging out and shooting the shit, he just didn’t _need_ them.  Then he’d met a loudmouthed, bitchy cop from New Jersey who stepped in and almost immediately filled the empty spot he hadn’t realized he had, the one left by his dad and Freddie.  It didn’t take long for Steve to realize what he’d been denying all along—that he did need people in his life, always had.  Suddenly, he’d gone from being this singular entity surrounded by people he liked, to being goddamn possessive of those in his life, possessive of one person in particular.  Danny was his, nothing was ever taking that away, and there was no way in hell he was walking away from that now that he had it.

“Not going n’where,” Steve managed to slur out. He twisted his fingers enough to grip Danny’s blood-slicked ones and squeeze.  It was a weak effort, but it seemed to be enough to keep the threatening panic at bay in his partner.

Every time Steve started to slip out of consciousness, Danny would squeeze his hand, and Steve would squeeze back.  It was a hell of alot easier than talking or keeping his eyes open for even a few minutes at a time…and time was doing strange things right then.  At one point, he realized he and Danny were sitting on the floor, his head resting on Danny’s shoulder, Eddie’s head on Steve’s knee, and Danny saying over and over that help was on the way, just a little longer.  Steve wasn’t sure if Danny was telling Steve or himself, but Steve squeezed the hand in his, and felt Danny rest his head on Steve’s as he squeezed back.   Another time he heard Eddie bark in greeting, saw Lou’s face, eyebrows turned down in worry even as he spoke reassurances to both Steve and Danny.  He could feel Danny pull in a breath, the way he did before he really laid into someone, and Steve squeezed again, heard Danny simply tell them to hurry up with the gurney.

Steve watched the ceiling fly by, fluorescent light fixtures creating a staccato pattern of light and dark as they passed overhead, felt as if he was floating a few feet off the ground with Danny jogging alongside, and that couldn’t be right, couldn’t be real.  He tried to lift his head, which just made the dizziness worse, so he squeezed Danny’s hand and closed his eyes.  It felt like the world was tilting on its axis, as if gravity just fucking gave up and decided to let everyone float away into space, drift right into the sun that was so dazzling bright he had to close his eyes against the glare. When he opened them again, he saw that he was flying for real. The sound of the rotors in the med-evac drowned out most of what Danny and the paramedic were saying, but he made out ‘Trippler’ and ‘surgical team standing by’ before he felt a needle slide home in his arm.  He tried to squeeze Danny’s hand and felt nothing but emptiness and growing panic.

“Commander,” the flight nurse said, “just relax.”

He hadn’t even noticed her on his other side until she spoke.  For a split second, her skin darkened, her smile turned taunting, and he was seeing Wo Fat’s assistant injecting him instead.

Danny’s hand landed on his chest.  “Just an I.V., Steve.” 

The hand rubbed soothingly, the way it did when Steve woke from a nightmare in the middle of the night.  Only they weren’t in bed, and time and gravity and, fuck, _all of it_ was feeling disjointed and surreal and… 

“Steve,” Danny said calmly, “do you remember the first time we met?”

Steve exhaled, clung to Danny’s words as desperately as he did to Danny’s hand that he had covered with his own.

He concentrated on answering Danny…

“Garage,” Steve mumbled.

The real Danny…

“And what did you say when I said we should wait for backup?”

His Danny…

“You’re m’backup.”

His…

“I’m your backup. _For life_ , Steven.”

…for life.

 

~H50~H50~H50~H50~H50~   

    

It was a depressing commentary on Danny Williams’ life that he knew how Steve would react in recovery even before he opened his eyes.  For Danny, post-op meant puking the minute he became aware of his surroundings; for Steve it was uncontrollable shaking.

As soon as the first tremors started, Danny squeezed Steve’s hand. “It’s okay, babe, it’s okay; _you’re_ okay.”

Steve’s eyes cracked open just enough to see his partner.  His teeth were chattering as he asked, “You…you still mine?”

“What?  You think I went and hooked up with the nurse while you were in surgery?”  Danny teased to cover his concern that Steve would ask him such an odd question.  Although, to be honest, he couldn’t seem to stop the mantra of, ‘mine, mine, mine,’ that kept rolling through his head as soon as he opened the door to Steve’s cell.  Danny was a possessive, selfish fucker when it came to Steve McGarrett, so sue him.

“Danny?”  The tone wasn’t the typical exasperation for Danny’s smartass comments; it was desperation.

Steve hated being out of it, whether due to anesthesia or painkillers, Danny knew the man would rather suffer through the hurt than lose lucidity.  Danny wasn’t sure exactly why, but he’d bet good money that Steve being drugged to within an inch of his life by Wo Fat sure hadn’t helped matters. He’d sat with Steve in the hospital after that whole ordeal, watched Steve fight the disorientation that lingered with the drugs coursing through his system, repeatedly delivered the bad news that his dad was still dead, and did his best to reassure Steve that he was going to be okay.  After finding Steve lying unmoving on the floor with a bullet groove on his temple, Danny had sworn to himself as much as to Steve that he was going to make damn sure of that.

It was that same determination that had Danny pressing his lips to the back of Steve’s hand and telling him confidently.  “For life, Steven.  I’m yours for life.”  He wrapped his other hand around the twitching fingers that he’d already linked with his own.  “Although that nurse was pretty damn hot.”

Even though the shivering continued, Steve visibly relaxed… only McGarrett could seem tense while still mostly under the effects of a general anesthetic… although he asked, “Promise?”

“Hey, I’m moving in with you, aren’t I?”

A tremor spread through Steve’s entire body, and Danny squeezed his hand harder. Steve did manage one of his goofy, Love Struck Puppy smiles, though. “Didn’t dream that.”

The nurse came in then, checking over Steve’s monitor as Steve raised eyebrows to see the woman who was shorter than Danny and looked like she could be twice his age.  Danny shrugged.  “Must have had a shift change.”

“I can give you something for the shaking, Commander,” the nurse offered.

Steve shook his head, held tighter to Danny’s hand.  Danny knew the routine; Demerol would help with the tremors but just make Steve sleep if he was lucky or loop him out of his head if it didn’t.

“Hey.”  Danny waggled the hand he held in his to get Steve’s attention.  “I’ll be here.”  Danny meant it as a reassurance that he’d be there when Steve woke up again, or he’d be there to help ground him through the shaking, or the dissociation of the drugs.  Whatever his choice, Danny had no intention of leaving his side.

Steve hesitated, but Danny could feel the shivering increasing, just as he could feel the worry crease deepening across his own forehead.  Steve must have seen it, too, because he finally nodded to the nurse.

“I’ll be right back,” the nurse promised.

When she left the room, Danny took up his seat next to Steve’s bed again, still maintaining a secure grip on Steve’s hand.

“Kids?” Steve asked through chattering teeth.

“Safe,” Danny promised him.  “Junior and Tani are with them on base.”  When Steve gave him a confused look, Danny shook his head.  “Long story.”  Although Danny had heard the abridged version from a very excited Charlie over the phone while Steve was in surgery.  “They’ll stop by later.”

Steve held tighter to Danny’s hand and rode out a particularly violent wave of shudders before asking. “London?”

Danny nodded.  “Tonight.  Joe’s arranging for them to be on a Space Available military hop flight to somewhere in Europe; he’s convinced the higher ups to stretch the meaning of military dependents for one day.  Harry says he’ll meet them and get them to London once they’re in his neck of the woods.”

Danny knew he might be on the paranoid side still making them leave the country, but better safe than sorry when it came to Grace and Charlie.

“Alejandro?”

“Queen’s medical,” Danny told him, which was why Steve was at Trippler.

Danny knew he might be on the paranoid side keeping him in a hospital on the opposite side of town from the psychopath who had orchestrated this nightmare of a day, but better safe than sorry when it came to Steve.

When Steve raised his eyebrows at the news she was in the hospital, Danny gave an uncomfortable shrug.  “Suffice to say the drain in the interrogation room came in handy.”

Fortunately, the nurse came in with the Demerol before Steve could ask exactly why.

Steve went a little wild eyed as soon as the drugs hit his system.

“Easy, babe, I got you,” Danny soothed, kissing Steve’s knuckles before resting their joined hands against his jaw.  The fingers against his skin twitched a few more times, then stilled as Steve’s eyes drifted closed once more.  “I got you,” he promised one more time, and he’d be damned if he ever let him go.  Resting his forehead against their hands, Danny gave his own shudder as the memories of seeing Steve through that tiny window in the middle of that fucking room, not responding when Danny was knocking desperately on the window, came back unbidden.  The last time he’d seen Steve surrounded by that much blood, Danny ended up half a liver lighter, and he’d been terrified he’d found Steve too late.  He could still feel that terror clinging to the edge of his sanity even now.  He’d been running on pure, unadulterated, weapons-grade adrenaline for hours now, and that, on top of barely sleeping thanks to a sick kid most of the night before, had Danny fighting to keep his own shaking at bay now that it looked like the spectacular fuckery of the past twenty-four hours had passed. 

Christ, had it only been a day since they first learned of Elena Alejandro?  It seemed like weeks had passed, months.

“Detective?”  The touch of the nurse’s hand to his shoulder had Danny looking up.  “Do you understand the readings on the monitor?”

Danny frowned but admitted, “Yeah…sort of.”

She walked him through them, explaining what each reading was, what was good, what was bad, what levels would cause the alarms to sound.  “His readings are good, stable,” she promised, “especially considering the trauma he suffered.  We’ll be moving him up to his room soon; he’ll probably sleep peacefully through the entire thing.  You might want to try to do the same once he’s settled.”

“Thank you,” Danny told her sincerely.

Steve didn’t wake for several hours.   True to the nurse’s word, they’d moved him to his own room by then, and Grace and Charlie had stopped by for a few minutes before they had to go back to Hickam for their flight. Danny sat in a chair near the foot of the bed with Charlie in his lap, answering the young boy’s questions about moving in to Uncle Steve’s house.

“Can Eddie sleep with me?”

“That’s up to Eddie,” Danny conceded.  “But he does sometimes now, so there’s a pretty good chance he will in your new room, too.”

“So what room is mine?” Charlie asked.

“Well, you can choose,” Danny explained.  “How about the one Uncle Steve had when he was your age?”

Charlie nodded.  “Can I keep my car bed?”

“Absolutely,” Danny promised.  “We’ll move all your stuff at our house over to our new house.”

“You’ll build it the exact same way it is now?” Charlie challenged.

Danny groaned internally at the thought of tackling that damn bed again.  “That’s the best way to build it, isn’t it?  I’ll get Uncle Steve to help me again.”

If he was lucky, he’d have Steve do more than help. When they’d decorated Charlie’s room in his house, Danny had been as relieved as he was exhausted when he’d come home in the wee hours of the morning to find Steve sound asleep on the couch, and Charlie sound asleep in a fully built bed.

“Nope, Uncle Steve didn’t help you,” Charlie informed him with a definitive shake of his head.  “He said you built it all by yourself the first time.”

“Uncle Steve told you that?”  Danny blinked in surprise, because Steve took credit for sandwiches Danny bought for their poker buddies when Danny wasn’t around.  No way he’d give Danny credit for building a bed when Danny hadn’t been able to figure out which piece to bolt to which straight out of the box. 

“He said you were the greatest,” Charlie confided.

“He still is the greatest,” Steve’s groggy voice chimed in.  “Always has been.”

“Uncle Steve!” Charlie exclaimed in unison with Gracie.

Grace had perked up from her seat beside the bed and taken Steve’s hand as soon as he started talking. 

Steve gave her a hazy smile. “Hey, sweetheart. I hear you did great with the driving.”

Grace dove in and hugged Steve, finally taking Danny’s word that Steve was going to be okay now that she saw it with her own eyes.

“Gracie, careful,” Danny warned, even as he let his very wiggly son down so he could climb up on the bed beside Steve.  “You, too, Charlie.”

“They’re good,” Steve grunted out, even as he returned the hugs with a grimace of obvious pain.

“Yeah, but you aren’t,” Danny challenged, “not completely.”

“I’m so far better than good right now, Danny, it’s crazy,” Steve assured with a smile, pained but genuine, and Danny couldn’t argue with that.

Steve spent the next few minutes answering more of Charlie’s questions about the move, until Junior showed up to give a quick greeting before taking Grace and Charlie back to the base for their flight.

“Is Tani going to drive again?” Charlie asked with more excitement than Danny felt was completely necessary.

“She’s with your mom getting your suitcases,” Junior explained.  “So I’ll drive you back with my friend Mike.”

“Did Mike have the big gun?”

Danny scrubbed at his face at his son’s question.  Honestly, he’d tried his damnedest not to think too much about what he’d heard regarding their race to Pearl Harbor, because every time he started to, he felt like he might curl into a ball in the corner and rock back and forth for a few months.  Best just to let his brain skitter over the details and concentrate on the fact that his children were alive and so was Steve.

“Okay, okay, where are my hugs?” Danny demanded, also changing the subject, holding his heart and soul close when they wrapped their arms around him.  “We’ll see you guys when you get back next week.  Love you and miss you already.”  He planted kisses on both their heads.

“Love you, Danno,” Grace told him before looking over his shoulder.  “Love you, Uncle Steve.”

“Love you guys,” Steve told them with a small wave, and Danny didn’t miss the melancholy tinge to his smile.

The smile gave way to a frown as they left the room.  “Maybe you should go with them.  If the Triad is still after them—“

Danny cut him off with a shake of his head.  “Triad isn’t going to be a problem anymore.”  He held up a box of nine apples, each individually wrapped in bright red tissue paper.

“Peace apples?” Steve noted with a raised eyebrow.

“According to Jerry that’s what they are,” Danny agreed, having never heard of the Chinese custom before.  “Courtesy of Jin Leung.  The card says he’s hoping you’ll have a quick recovery and long and prosperous life.”  Danny shrugged.  “I guess that means he’s making sure Bai Zhun doesn’t interfere with either of those well wishes.”

Danny had already decided, as soon as Steve was out of the woods, he was going to appeal to the Triad boss to ensure his family’s safety, even if it meant letting the old man’s grandson beat the shit out of him in front of the Bruce Lee movie of his choice.  Then the apples showed up by special currier on their own, so win win for him and Steve both.

“We should send a gift in return,” Steve told him.  “Let him know—“

The fact that Steve was already giving orders again, in his typical, everyday, nowhere near the brink of death way, had Danny cutting him off with a warm kiss…and maybe it became a little desperate when Steve kissed him back… then stayed in close when they parted.

“Hey,” Steve murmured, his thumb running along Danny’s jaw.  “You okay?”

“Not by a long shot,” Danny confessed with a brittle laugh.  It was the anniversary of finding Matty in a drum, his children had been chased through the streets of Honolulu by Triad assassins, and Steve…Steve had nearly bled out in his arms waiting for an ambulance to arrive because of a fucking traffic jam.  As it was, they’d had to wheel his gurney several blocks away to an area with enough clearance for the flight for life helicopter to land. Danny was honest to God holding on by a thread at the moment. “But I will be if I can do that a few hundred times more.” Grace and Charlie were safe, Steve’s vitals still held steady in the safe zone the nurse had showed him on the monitors, and that was good enough for now.  It was going to have to be.  

“Well, if that’s the only way to keep you sane, I don’t really have a choice, do I?” Steve grinned before leaning in for another kiss.

“Mandarin oranges,” Danny said when they came up for air again.

“What?” Steve frowned in confusion.

“We already sent Jin Leung mandarin oranges as a thank you.”  Jerry had helped with the research on that one.

Steve smiled again.  “You really are the greatest.”

The doctor came in, unfortunately before any more purely therapeutic kissing could take place. Danny made room, moving the chair he’d been sitting in with Charlie a little further into the corner of the room.  Before the doctor had left, Lou and Jerry showed up, followed by Duke, Pua, a steady stream of HPD, and other well-wishers.  Danny woke with a start when Eric touched his shoulder.  He hadn’t even realized his nephew had stopped in, or that he’d fallen asleep.

“You want me to give you a lift home, Uncle D?”

It took him a second to realize why Eric would even offer, then he remembered his Camaro was still at Lou’s, and he’d left Rachel’s car on the side of the road when the traffic came to a complete stop. He’d run the last four blocks with Eddie hot on his heels in their search for Steve.

“Thanks, Eric, but I’m good.  I’ll…take a cab or call when I’m ready to go.”  Which would be when Steve was discharged, and not a minute before.

“Danny,” Steve called from his bed, “go home.  Get some sleep.”  Steve was looking as tired as Danny felt thanks to his afternoon of visitors.

Danny waved a dismissive hand.  “Later.”  Danny gave Eric a stern glare to let him know not to offer again.

“Oookay,” Eric said as he backed toward the door, “I’ll see you two tomorrow,” then he turned and bolted.

“You’re exhausted,” Steve told him needlessly.

“Says the exhausted man,” Danny countered.

“Danny…”

Danny shrugged to stop Steve from arguing the point.  “Then I’ll sleep.”

Of course, when had Steve never argued the point?

“In a plastic chair?” Steve challenged.  “Go home.  Sleep in a real bed and get some real sleep.  You can still catch Eric—“

“Stop.  Just stop, will you.”  Danny leaned forward, arms on his knees, and hung his head.  “I’m not leaving.  You know it, I know it, so just, please, I’m asking nicely, just stop.”

Danny looked up to see Steve staring at him with a worried furrow between his brows.  Miracle of miracles, he didn’t argue, though.  “Then get your ass over here.”

Pushing himself up wearily, he couldn’t help but wince from his tender ribs thanks to the slugs he’d taken to his vest.  Steve frowned at the way Danny moved.  “Doctor checked it while you were in surgery,” Danny assured.  “Nothing’s broken; just bruised.”  Then he started laughing when he saw Steve scooting slightly, as if he was making room for Danny in the bed.  “Hope springs eternal with you, don’t it, babe?”

“Look, either you sleep in bed with me or you sleep in bed at home—“

“You are such a piece of shit, Steven, but you know that.” Danny cut him off with a wave of his arms when he started to say more, and yeah, that wasn’t a great idea, given the way he sucked in a breath and had to brace himself on edge of the bed when his ribs protested at the action. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?” Danny looked heavenward when Steve had the nerve to appear confused.  “You always make me say it.  Fine, I’ll say it.  I love you, _you idiot_.  I’m not leaving you in the hospital alone, and I’m not going home, because I’m already home, here, _with you_.”

Steve’s face morphed into that dopey grin that was as smug as it was smitten.  “You don’t have to say it, Danno.  Doesn’t mean I don’t like hearing it when you do.”

“Fuck you, McGarrett,” Danny snapped, before leaning down and kissing Steve warmly then collapsing heavily into the chair beside his bed.  “I love you so damn much…”

Danny couldn’t finish the sentence.   There must have been words that could describe how much Steve meant to him, but if there were, they were lost to him.  Lost the way he would be if he had been a few minutes later in reaching Steve today.  Lost the way he wished those thoughts of how fucking close he’d come to being too late would be.  Besides, his throat had tightened along with his chest, and words wouldn’t force their way out even if he had them.  Christ, he was going to lose it but good.  He dropped his head to the mattress of Steve’s hospital bed, concentrated on breathing in and out even as he felt warm tears overflow when he squeezed his eyes shut, and tried not to freak Steve out any more than he was sure he already had.

Steve’s fingers brushed through Danny’s hair, and Danny couldn’t stop the quake that passed through him.

“When I thought you had died in that explosion,” Steve said quietly, his fingers continuing their repetitive motion along Danny’s scalp, “everything inside me just sort of shut down.  Then once the initial relief that you were okay was past, everything went into overdrive.  I woke up in the middle of the night a couple days later, you were there sound asleep, and everything was good, hell, it was perfect. Suddenly, my brain…I don’t know, it sort of shorted out, started running through all these scenarios where you didn’t make it out.  I went and locked myself in the bathroom, sat on the floor, and had a mini-breakdown or panic attack or…fuck, I don’t even know what to call it.  All I know is that it sucked, I have no clue how to keep it from happening, and I hate that you’re going to go through it now.”

Danny snorted wetly, rubbed his face on the bleach-scented sheets to dry it as best he could, then turned it up to look at Steve. “I really do love you.”

“I really do love you, too,” Steve told him with a soft smile.  “Sure you won’t climb in bed with me?”

“You have so many wires and leads coming out of you that I’m having flashbacks to hooking up the surround sound system on the television and blu-ray player.”  Danny pillowed his head on his arms, with no intention of moving from his current spot next to Steve.  “Besides, you have bullet holes on both sides of you.  Even when we’re back at the house, I have no idea how we’re going to sleep in the same bed together.”

Steve resumed the soothing play of fingers through Danny’s hair.  “We’ll sleep at different angles.”

“Angles?”  Danny scoffed, even as his eyes drifted shut.  “Seriously?”

“Angles,” Steve confirmed.  “I was really good at geometry.”

Ends up Steve wasn’t lying, as Danny learned several days later when Steve had been released and they were back at his place… _their_ place…in bed.  Danny was lying nearly perpendicular to Steve, his head resting on Steve’s collarbone as he stared dazedly up at the ceiling.  Steve’s left hand was back in the hair on his head, while his right circled lazily through the hairs on Danny’s chest.

“Okay…you weren’t kidding about the whole geometry thing,” Danny conceded, considering the way Steve had come up with the proper positioning of Danny’s body so Steve could lounge back against a mass of pillows propped against the headboard and still suck Danny’s cock without putting too much pressure on Danny’s ribs.

“Got an A for the semester,” Steve told him proudly.

“Babe, you get an A for _life_ , not to mention a gold star.” Danny declared, gingerly flipping over so he could kiss Steve’s chest, careful of the lingering bruises from Steve’s run in with the car the week before, then worked his lips up along Steve’s neck to finally reach his ridiculously talented mouth.

Steve moaned into Danny’s mouth, cupping his jaw, and kissing him back deeply. “You know what would be even better than a gold star, Danno?” he murmured after Danny nipped his lower lip then moved to nuzzle along Steve’s jaw.  When Danny lifted his head, Steve glanced meaningfully down his body to his own swollen dick.

Danny may not have been a geometry genius, but he’d learned a hell of a lot about supply and demand with his Econ degree.  Steve had been demanding Danny supply him with a blowjob since they’d walked through the front door.  Well, Danny had walked; Steve had hobbled in on crutches, then leaned heavily on Danny as they made their way up the stairs.  Danny wasn’t fooling himself into thinking Steve needed to lean against him; the man had been free climbing buildings a month before the doctors had cleared him to drive a car after the liver transplant.   Besides, he was sucking on Danny’s earlobe and telling him about the other things he planned to suck all the way to the bedroom.  Danny wouldn’t deny he was just as hard as Steve by the time they had carefully stripped and both eased onto the bed, and he’d let Steve maneuver him into a position straddling Steve’s chest and bracing himself against the headboard while Steve slowly worked his mouth and tongue over the entirety of Danny’s length.  It kept Danny’s motion to a minimum to protect his ribs, but it wasn’t quite enough to get off…that was until Steve’s fingers joined in, and Danny lost it all together.

Danny knew Steve wasn’t just being selfless by letting Danny go first, he was very familiar with how Steve’s scheming, little brain worked.  Steve figured if Danny were happy and sated, that he’d be more amenable to what Steve wanted to do, or have done to him. Danny, however, was the only supplier in town as far as Steve’s sex life was concerned, and that gave him more leverage at the bargaining table.

“Listen,” Danny cautioned, “if I do this, you have to promise not to move.”

“Danny, I’m fine,” Steve swore with an aggrieved sigh.

“Oh, yeah, tell that to the holes in your body.  Never mind the stitches that ripped when you started puking.”

Steve’s temperature had risen on the second day he was in the hospital, which had the doctors ‘watching it carefully’. Danny just knew that was medical code for ‘worried as fuck’…or maybe that was simply his assessment.  Then Steve had thrown up, which had them running all sorts of test.  When Danny started puking a few hours later, with the same fever, they realized that the two men had simply succumbed to Charlie’s stomach flu.  The good news was that the worst of it really did only last about twenty-four hours, and it provided Danny a cover for having his minibreakdown on the bathroom floor like Steve warned him he would.  The bad news was that Steve’s stitches couldn’t take the retching.  They’d given Steve the high-octane, anti-puking drugs that had him drooling into his pillow in less than an hour.  Once he was out, the doctor offered the same to Danny.   Danny had taken her up on the offer, sleeping for most of the day in a chair that converted to a cot that someone had brought down for him from the maternity ward. 

When Danny woke, Steve was still out, but he saw Tani sitting in the plastic chair flipping through a magazine. With a groan, Danny sat up and said, “Please don’t tell me you’re here to offer me a ride home.”

Tani didn’t even stop turning pages. “Knowing the way our stupid hearts work?  I wouldn’t think of it.” 

“So you thought you’d just stop by and watch us sleep, because that’s not creepy in the least.”

“I took Steve’s truck to get debarfed a few blocks from here. I’m waiting for them to finish up.” Tani pulled a duffle bag from under the chair and kicked it in Danny’s direction.  “Besides, I thought you might like a change of clothes, or three.”

Danny still felt the lingering desire to toss his cookies, but it was tempered by the gratitude he felt.  Still, he gave her a skeptical look.  “Should I ask how you got into my house?”

She waggled Steve’s truck keys that had his copy of Danny’s house key on the ring.  “I’m weasely that way, Detective Williams.”

With a smile, Danny patted over his heart.  “You sure the hell are, Officer Rey.”

“Puking stopped three days ago,” Steve reminded impatiently.  “The stitches are fine.  Get your mouth on me.”

“I just want to be sure you understand the consequences if you don’t stay still,” Danny warned, testing the waters by teasing at one of Steve’s nipples with his tongue.

“Oh, Jesus,” Steve groaned, lifting his hips slightly from the mattress.

Danny raised his head.  “See?  You can’t even stay still, and I’m a nowhere near your dick.”

“Danny, I swear to God—“

“There are rules, Steven, and if you can’t follow them, there will be ramifications.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed dangerously.  “Ramifications?”

“Ramifications,” Danny reiterated, “like no blowjobs.”

Steve pursed his lips and nodded as if contemplating what Danny had just told him.  “Let me tell you something, Danny.  If you don’t start sucking my cock immediately, I will flip you over and give you some ramifications of my own, right into the goddamn mattress.”

“That would rip out your stitches,” Danny informed him calmly, although his own traitorous dick twitched at the idea.

“I don’t give a shit,” Steve told him just as evenly.

“See, this is why I’m hesitant to do this,” Danny reasoned.  “You get very excitable when it comes to sex.”

“I do not get excitable!” Steve snapped excitably as he pointed at his penis.  “Now get to work!”

Downstairs, the doorbell rang.  Steve glared at Danny.  “Don’t you even think of going to answer that.”

Before Danny could straighten, he heard the door open with a knock, and Lou called out, “Steve?  You awake?”

Danny started to sit, and Steve grabbed his arm as he yelled, “Not a good time, Lou!”

“Come on, Steve, I’ve got mochi from Bubbies.” Lou coaxed.  “They even had the cherry blossom flavor you like.”

Steve’s grip on Danny’s arm just tightened.  “Lou, I swear to God, if you don’t leave, I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m trying to convince Danny to do to me!”

“Okay, I’m out,” Lou grumbled.

At the same time, a feminine voice responded, “So we’ll just put the ice cream in the freezer, then?”

Steve groaned and released Danny, who called out, “Hi, Renee.”  He was already pulling on the nearest pair of boxers.

“Hi, Danny,” she greeted back.

Danny tugged on Steve’s Navy t-shirt as he walked out into the hallway to lean on the banister and wave down to the Grovers, who stood just inside the front door.

“I didn’t see your car in the driveway,” Lou offered as explanation. “Thought Steve was here by himself, or we would have waited for someone to answer the door.”

Danny waved off the excuse.  “Got it in the body shop early.  Junior dropped it off for me last night.”  Hitching his thumb over his shoulder toward the bedroom, Danny shook his head.  “Don’t worry about him; he’s just a little excitable this morning.”

“I’m not excitable!” Steve protested once more.

Danny shrugged with a shake of his head and flutter of his hands to silently say, ‘What are you going to do?’

Renee lifted her hand as if to stop his apology, hitched her head toward Lou, and rolled her eyes, as if to say, ‘He’s the same way.’

When Lou frowned at her, Renee indicated the box of mochi she held.  “So, I’ll just put these in the freezer, and we’ll be on our way, and you two can get back to….”  She trailed off and instead headed for the kitchen.

Lou became very interested in his shoes.

“Listen,” Danny offered when Renee came back in the living room.  “Why don’t you two come by later for dinner?  We’ll throw something on the grill.”

“Are you sure?”  Renee asked.  “Will that be enough time to…get over the excitability?”

Behind him, Danny could hear Steve groan in embarrassment.

“Six o’clock,” Danny assured.  “We’ll have the ice cream for dessert.”

“Okay, we’ll see you then,” Renee promised.

Lou gave an awkward wave.  “There is not enough bleach on this island to erase what I’ve seen and heard from those two this week,” he told his wife as he closed the door behind them.

Danny padded back into the bedroom.  “You need to be nicer to them,” he chastised the man lying with his arm draped over his eyes in mortification.  “They could be our in-laws one day.”

Steve lifted his head.  “In-laws?”

“Yeah, if Grace and Will eventually get married, and when we’re married, we’ll be in-laws with Lou and Renee.”  Danny knew the whole Grace’s-wedding-day dream was just a hallucination, but things had worked out with Steve, so it could work out with them, as well.  “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not wanting Grace to get married any time soon, but I know she will someday, and Will’s a good kid.  The devil you know, right?”  Steve’s goofy smile had Danny feeling like he’d walked into some sort of trap.  “What?”

“You said, ‘when’,” Steve told him.

“What when?” Danny asked, feeling the snare tighten. “When did I say when?”

“When we get married,” Steve repeated his words back at him.  “You said, ‘when’.”

“Well, sure,” Danny shifted uncomfortably.  “What?  You don’t think we’ll get married someday?”

Steve ignored the question, just asked instead, “When’s when?”

Shit.  How the hell did he walk into something like this?  His brain scrambled and landed on the best way to distract Steve.  He tossed aside the t-shirt and stepped out of the boxers.

“I think I still owe you a blowjob.”

Steve just shook his head.  “When’s when, Danny?”

“So now you don’t want me to blow you?”

“When’s when?”

“Seriously?”        

“When’s when?”

“Steven…”

“Daniel.  When’s when?”

“When’s when…”  Danny scrubbed his face.  “…whenever when is.”

“That’s not an answer,” Steve challenged.

“Well, it’s the answer you’re getting.”  Danny shook his head.  “What is up with you? A month ago, you started pushing me to move in, completely out of the blue.  Now you want me to set a wedding date?”

“What’s up with you?” Steve demanded in return.  “Why are you so against moving in?” 

“I’m not against it.” Danny bobbled his head when Steve’s expression said Danny was full of shit.  “Not really.”

“We spend every night together.”  Steve reasoned.  “You refused to even leave the hospital.  I don’t get it.  You obviously like being together in the same general vicinity.  What are you so afraid of by making it official?”

“Dying!” Danny snapped, finally saying what he hadn’t for weeks now.  “I’m afraid of dying!”

“Like I’m going to kill you?” Steve asked in confusion. “Because I gotta tell you, Danny, right now? That’s kind of tempting.”

“No, like I’m going to be killed in the line of duty, or even off duty, or something.”  Christ, Danny knew he sounded like a crazy person.

“You’re afraid _you’re_ going to die?” Steve waved a hand at the bandages on his hip and leg.

“Oh, as if next time it won’t be me?  Not like I haven’t been on death’s door multiple times in the past year.”   Danny crossed his arm defensively, which seemed a little ridiculous when he thought about it since he was totally nude.  “And what happens if I do die? I’ll tell you what.  I’ll be dead, and you’ll be here in this fucking house all alone again.” 

“What does this house—,” Steve started to protest.

“ _This house,_ Steven, where people die and leave, but you stay, and it…it honest to God breaks my heart to see it, to watch _you_ when it happens.  Hell, you were even upset when Junior moved out, and we were already sleeping together.”

“Junior was a very good roommate,” Steve justified lamely.       

“Your dad, your mom, Aunt Deb… don’t get me started on how you moped around here for weeks after Catherine left, both times.  The only reason you were going to ask her to marry you was so she would stay. I mean, is that why you asked me to move in?  To keep me from leaving?  Because, I sure the hell don’t ever want to leave you, but if something does happen to me, and I’m living here, the _kids_ are living here… Babe, I can’t stand to think of you in this fucking house alone again with us just joining all these ghosts you keep around you.”

Steve apparently gave up on his denials.  “You’re right, Danny, I was going to propose to Cath so she would stay.  I kept thinking, ‘I could be happy with her. I could raise a family with her and grow old with her’, and yeah, I could have done all those things.  But with you… there’s no _could be_.  I _am_ happy with you.  Last month, when Junior asked why you hadn’t moved in yet, and I saw you sitting on your damn car watching me leave for training, I realized I had never wanted anything more in my life than you.  I _want_ to grow old with you.  I _want_ you and Grace and Charlie for as long as I can have you.  I thought you and me…”  He sighed.  “I thought we were ready. I’m not trying to trick you into staying; I just thought you’d want this as much as I do.”

Danny sat on the edge of the bed.  “I do want this, Steve.  You and me, I want it something crazy.”

“Then stop over-thinking it.”  Steve took Danny’s hand and linked their fingers, studied them closely.  “Stop trying to come up with reasons why we can’t have this, and let’s just have it instead.  You’re right, you could die, I could die.  Isn’t that just one more reason why we shouldn’t waste anymore time putting it off?  Danny, if something happens to you, do you really think it’s going to make a difference if you’re living here in this house instead of yours?  Either way, I’m the one packing up your shit, there’s a good chance I’m the one putting Grace and Charlie on a plane back to New Jersey with Rachel.  It doesn’t matter where you’re living at the time, if you die, I’m…I’m not getting over it.  Okay?  I’m not ever getting over it.  So, let’s enjoy the fuck out of this for as long as we can.”

Steve was staring at him with a desperate, hopeful expression that always made Danny cave.  Besides, he was right.  He was goddamn right about all of it.

“Yeah, okay, I’d like that,” Danny told him with a nod followed up by a warm kiss. 

“Really?”  Steve was studying him closely.  “No more second guessing?”

“Yes, really,” Danny assured.  “I mean, I practically proposed to you, didn’t I?”

Steve gave a disbelieving snort.  “When?”

“When I said when,” Danny reminded.

“That’s a proposal?” Steve shook his head in disbelief.

“You sure seemed to think it was,” Danny countered.

“That wasn’t a proposal.  If it was it was the worst proposal I’ve ever heard.”

“Compared to what?  How many times have you been proposed to before?”

“As of right this second? Exactly zero, because that was not a proposal.”

“Okay, fine.  Steven Jack McGarrett, will you marry me?”

“Depends,” Steve said with a shrug.

Danny’s eyes widened in outrage.  “On _what_?”

“On when when is.”

“You don’t preface acceptance of a marriage proposal on the wedding date.  You accept the proposal then set the date.”  Danny laid out the order neatly with his hands.

“How do I know this isn’t just some delay tactic?  We get engaged, I think everything’s set, then it conveniently never happens.”

Danny clutched his chest.  “I am deeply wounded.  You really think I’d do that?”  God, what a genius plan.  Why didn’t he think of that?

“At some point, you’re going to have to buy the cow, Danny.  You’re not going to keep getting the milk for free.”

“Says the cow who just minutes ago was begging me for a milking!”  Danny jabbed a finger at the udder…penis in question.

Steve grinned and simply asked, “When’s when?” yet fucking again.

Jesus, he wasn’t going to let this go. Danny considered his sanity, considered Steve’s infuriating, unrelenting,  merciless perseverance, considered his children coming back from England to find their father driven nuts and twitching erratically every time he heard the word ‘when’, and let out a heavy sigh.  “Before Grace gets married, but after we figure out whose furniture is going where in this damn house.” 

Steve considered for a second before giving a definitive nod of his head.  “That works.”

“That works?  _That works_?”  Danny pulled back and screwed his face in disgust.  “ _That’s_ how you accept a marriage proposal?”

“It’s not like I can get down on one knee with this leg, Danny,” Steve justified.

“It’s a yes or no question, McGarrett. Yes or no; those are the only acceptable answers.”  

“That works is just as good,” Steve defended.

Danny rolled his eyes, then stood to move back to his position on Steve’s opposite side.  “Fine, whatever. I rescind my crappy proposal because of your crappy acceptance.”

“You can’t rescind a proposal,” Steve argued.

“Oh, yeah? Seems like I just did. Honestly, I’m laying even odds that one of us smothers the other in his sleep before this move is finished, so I wouldn’t go registering for his and his towels anytime soon if I were you.”

Steve’s lips twitched, but as soon as Danny was back beside him in bed, he leaned forward to kiss Danny, taking his time to be as thorough as possible.

For a few minutes, Danny became lost in that kiss, and so did all his anxieties about almost losing Steve, about being left behind, about moving in and moving on with their life together, about the fear of unintentionally breaking Steve’s heart by giving his entirely.  At that moment, all he knew was the contrast of soft lips and rough stubble, the gentle tug on his lower lip followed by the give and take as Steve’s tongue played along his own.  All he cared about was that he and Steve were together, and in all the messy, dangerous, chaos of their lives, that was about as good as it got. 

Steve finally pulled back, ran his nose against Danny’s, spoke softly against Danny’s lips.  “I love you, Danny Williams.”

Danny closed his eyes, used the hand resting against Steve’s neck to pull him in close enough to lean his forehead against Steve’s, and confessed earnestly, “I love you, too, Steve McGarrett.”

Steve didn’t move away, just exhaled contentedly as he threaded his fingers through the hairs at the nape of Danny’s neck.  “I really do like to hear you say that.”        

Danny wasn’t the best at expressing his emotions, not the positive ones anyway.  With Grace and Charlie, sure, it came easy. How could anyone not love those kids?  With his family, no big deal.  Besides, if he didn’t say it to them, he faced the wrath of his Ma, who believed it was written into the U. S. Constitution, or at least the Jersey statutes, that you were legally required to love your family.  

However, with others, things got more complicated.  They read either too much or too little into those words, so it was simply easier not to say them. He‘d dated Melissa for years and never really got those exact words out of his mouth, and he sure didn’t put it down in writing. Maybe that was a messed up attitude to have, but Danny could admit to himself he was fucked up in a lot of ways.

Although, with Steve, he’d said those words more than with pretty much anyone, and that was even before the sex.

“Yeah, I know you do.  I should do better, say it more often.”

Steve, however, was shaking his head.  “I don’t need to hear it more.  When you say it, I know you mean it, that it’s the truth; that’s why I like it so much.”

There were times in Danny’s life when things just sort of all fell into place.  Not many and not often, but kind of like what Steve had just said about Danny’s expressions of love, when one of those times did happen, Danny knew it was real, that it meant something, something good. It was kind of like a gift he never knew he wanted until he opened it, and then he couldn’t imagine how he’d ever lived without it.

Like the first time he held Grace in his arms.

Like the first time Charlie called him Danno.

Like being loved and accepted for being his messed up, fucked up, self.

Like the feel of Steve’s pulse thrumming steadily under his palm.

Like now.

“Marry me, Steven.”  Danny had never made a more truthful request in his life.

And Steve answered just as honestly, “Yes.”

 

The End

 


End file.
